DIVERSICON 16

bumping this to the top to show off the cool T-shirt designed by Marge Simon.











DIVERSICON 16

Oh, sweet mystery...


Where: Minneapolis, Minnesota
When: August 1 - 3, 2008
Who?
Guest of Honor: Anne Frasier
Check out the Diversicon website and click on latest update to download PDF file and registration form.




But wait! That's not all!


Diversicon 16 Flash Fiction Contest


Short stories up to 250 words on the convention theme of "Oh, Sweet Mystery . . ." Submit no later than midnight Central Time July 14 to diversicon16flash@gmail.com. No entry fee, but open only to attending members of the convention. Entries will be judged by the convention Guest of Honor, professional author Anne Frasier. Entries will be judged on the creative interpretation of the theme, the quality of the writing, and emotional/intellectual impact. Top prize is a cool certificate, the honor of winning, a round of applause, the opportunity to read your work to the assembled convention. For more information:

DIVERSICON 16

more about Diversicon




Special Guest: Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, PhD

Author, journalist, and professor Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu uses both her Nigerian and American backgrounds in her fiction: the novels Zahrah the Windseeker (Houghton Mifflin, 2005) and The Shadow Speaker (Hyperion, October 2007), the play Full Moon, as well as stories in the anthologies The Witching Hour, Mojo Conjure Stories (Nalo Hopkinson, ed.), Writers of the Future Volume 18, and So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction (Nalo Hopkinson & Uppinder Mehan, eds.) and the professional online magazine Strange Horizons. Her essay on author Virginia Hamilton appeared in Dark Matter II: Reading the Bones (Sheree R. Thomas, ed.).
Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

She holds a PhD in English (emphasis on creative writing) from the University of Illinois--Chicago; an MA in English, also from UI Chicago (thesis: The Legend of Arro-yo); and an MA in journalism from Michigan State University--East Lansing (thesis: Virtual Women: Female Characters in Video Games). She is also a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop.




Posthumous Guests of Honor:
Scheherazade, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jack Williamson

Scheherazade (ca. 800): Legendary Persian narrator of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, a compilation of Persian, Arabic, Indian, and other folktales, including "Aladdin and the Lamp," "The Seven Voyages of Sinbad," and "The Thief of Baghdad." A highly educated woman, Scheherazade distracted her misogynist husband from killing her by telling captivating stories. The various translations of these tales have influenced artists, composers, and screenwriters around the world.

Sir Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980): Director of many films over five decades in Great Britain and the United States, including the haunting Rebecca (1940), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960), and the SFnal The Birds (1963; guaranteed to make you nervous around flocks of crows!), Hitchcock worked repeatedly with interlocking themes of sex and death. He also featured female characters who were both glamorous and strong actors with their own agendas, and he dealt obliquely with homosexuality despite the Hollywood Production Code.

Jack Williamson, PhD (1908-2006): Author of Darker Than You Think (1948), The Humanoids (1949), a collection of short stories titled The Best of Jack Williamson (1977), and the autobiography Wonder�s Child: My Life in Science Fiction (1984, rev. 2005), Williamson traveled west by covered wagon in 1915, then went on to write imaginative science fiction over many decades. He first saw his work published in an SF magazine in 1928, he cowrote the first story of revolution on the Moon with Dr. Miles Breuer ("The Birth of a New Republic," Amazing Stories, Winter 1931), coined the word terraforming in his 1942 novel Seetee Ship, and saw his last novel (The Stonehenge Gate) published in 2005. Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) honored him with its second-ever Grand Master award in 1976 (the first recipient was Robert Heinlein). He won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards (for his novella The Ultimate Earth) in 2001, becoming by far the oldest author to have won these awards. He earned a PhD in English from the University of Colorado--Boulder (his dissertation focused on the works of H. G. Wells) and taught science fiction writing at Eastern New Mexico University from 1960 through the 21st century.