ICON Science Fiction, the parent company of LI-CON, is having an alien-themed benefit event on October 18 beginning at 6:00 pm. Your membership fee gets you not one, not two, but three stand-up comics, in addition to a 3-course meal and some of the best company on several planets.
And just to sweeten things: since this is a fund-raiser for ICON, a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation, your membership fee is tax-deductible.
I’m sorry to report that CJ Henderson, LI-CON vendor and one of the nicest people I have ever met, inside or outside the SFF business, has lost his long fight with cancer. I’m glad we all had the chance to talk to him at our inaugural convention.
While we try to nail down a location and time for LI-CON 2, we’d love for you to come to the ICON Book Club. ICON is the company sponsors LI-CON (and other events), and we recently opened a book discussion group that meets about 9 times a year. If you’ve ever been curious about the gang of nutballs who run these conventions, this is your chance to come meet us and also maybe have some appetizers, and an interesting conversation.
The club will meet next on August 13 and discuss Everything’s Better With Monkeys by LI-CON guest and local favorite CJ Henderson. Buy a copy through our Amazon store before the meeting–you pay the same price, and ICON gets a percentage to help us fund our events!
If you’re going to attend, please email Sara, head of the Book Club, as bookclub@iconsf.org, so we can have the right number of handouts and stuff ready, and of course so we can tell you where we’ll be meeting.
LI-CON Chair Carl Fink (that’s me!) will be a Program Participant at 8Pi-Con June 27-29 in Enfield, Connecticut. My schedule is:
Fri 9:00pm How to Think Good (mod)
Sat 10:00am Who Isn’t a Fan? (mod)
Sat 12:00pm How do Cons Happen?
Sat 3:00pm Your Monkey’s An Uncle
Sat 4:00pm Biology is Weird (mod)
Sat 7:00pm The Year (and a half) in Science (mod)
Sun 12:00pm Telling Science from Nons(ci)ense
Alert congoers may spot another LI-CON exec or two at Pi-con.
When our team decided to call our new convention “LI-CON” we were sure that it was a brand-new, brilliant, perfect name.
Two out of three ain’t bad, right?
It turns out that in 1983, a team that was planning to run a World Science Fiction Conventionbid ran a convention named “LICon” at the Hempstead Plaza hotel (which seems to not exist any more). I can’t locate any official record of that convention, so I’m grateful to Louis Epstein for telling me about it. Apparently this team never ran another Long Island-based con, although some of them were involved in running two NYClones (oddly held in New Jersey).
We’re glad to continue the tradition started back in ’83, although I think we will be putting on another LI-CON in less than 30 years!
I just want to give a quick shout out to Trin and all the folks at Cards Against Humanity. They have generously donated sets of cards that will be part of our game tomorrow night and I just want to say thank you to the whole team for all the help and support during the lead up to our event.