“Just like old times” Rob Sawyer had suggested to us, and by “us” I mean the SFContario concom. Rob has been a big supporter of SFContario since we first started talking about a new fall con in Toronto and the conversation at First Thursday, a monthly gathering of the fen in Toronto, invariably turns to it. When he found out that Michael Swanwick had accepted our invitation to be Author Guest of Honour, he came up with the idea. After all, Rob, our Toastmaster, has written books about dinosaurs: the Quintaglio Ascension Trilogy; Michael Swanwick wrote a book about dinosaurs: Bones of the Earth, and our goal was to create a fannish con just like downtown Toronto used to have. So a theme of “Just like old times” built around dinosaurs was a good fit.

Of course, it evolved (some might argue devolved), from there. You see, since our editor Guests of Honour are Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, proprietors of the excellent blog, Making Light, and it turns out that if you google the phrase “dinosaur sodomy” the first hit leads to a story, involving Michael Swanwick, first related on Making Light. Well, bring in a connection to two more guests of honour, stir in a slightly irreverent concom, and the next thing you know, dinosaur sodomy became the unofficial theme for SFContario.

The story goes something like this: Michael Swanwick was teaching a week at Clarion and a student came to him with a story, full of angst and sodomy. He read the story and told the student “What this story needs is more dinosaurs.” A day or two later the student brings him a story about dinosaurs. “What this story needs,” he says, “is more sodomy.”  He then explained to the perplexed class that “all writing is about finding the correct balance between dinosaurs and sodomy.” (The story goes on from there, and is very funny. You should read it all, including the comments. See here.)

So, where to go from there?  You can doubtless take dinosaur sodomy to a lot of places, some of them frightening. “Wouldn’t it be funny,” we mused, “if we had a dinosaur t-shirt.  Something very subtle, perhaps one dinosaur standing behind another.” The intention was that somebody would only be likely to see it if they were already in on the joke; we figured we could probably sell a hundred or so to the denizens of Making Light alone. So we turned to local fan artist and Hugo nominee Taral Wayne. We told him what we were looking for. “It has to be subtle, okay, nothing too obvious, and also subtle…oh and did we mention that we were looking for something subtle?” 

Taral Wayne being subtle

Apparently no, we didn’t, not strongly enough. Below is the drawing Taral did for us. We love it. It’s probably not going to be on a t-shirt anytime soon, but we’ll find a way to use it. Maybe for a progress report, a suitable follow up to the Sue Mason illo that appears in progress report 1, and it’s a great conversation starter at parties. In the meantime I, for one, look forward to Taral’s further attempts at subtlety.

Still not sure how we’re going to explain the dinosaur sodomy to Rob Sawyer, though.

Ad Astra is underway. If you are coming by car, you need pay only $6.00 not $13.50 for parking. More members in costume this year walking the hallways. The dealer’s room is two rooms instead of one room. And in the Art Show, more jewellery than I remember. This morning fans were invited to go outside and stare at the sun: through a telescope with a filter I saw the red sun and a solar flare.

The SFContario table is dressed with five Swanwick titles and the Patrick Nielsen Hayden-edited Starlight 2 and 3. (A blood-soaked zombie in front of me just assured a friend “I’m not sticky.”) The GoH display books are standing side-by-side. A piece of paper with one word printed on it is sticking out of the top of each book. From the left the passerby sees “SFContario Guest of Honour Michael Swanwick Patrick Nielsen Hayden.”

The Hugo nominations have been announced and are online on the Aussiecon 4 web site.

SFContario would like to congratulate our Author Guest of Honour, Michael Swanwick, who received a nomination in the category of Best
Related Work for Hope in the Mist, a study of British author Hope Mirrlees. We would also like to congratulate Editor Guest of Honour
Patrick Nielsen Hayden, a nominee in the Best Editor, Long Form category.

Further congratulations go out to our Toastmaster, Robert J. Sawyer, who received a nomination for Best Novel for WWW:Wake.
Additional congratulations are due to Rob, as the pilot episode for the series FlashForward, “No More Good Days,” based on Rob’s novel
of the same name, was nominated for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form.

Additionally, we’d also like to highlight nominations for other Toronto authors and fans:

Congratulations to our guests Michael Swanwick and Patrick Nielsen-Hayden for appearing on the 2010 Hugo Ballot.

Michael is a BEST RELATED WORK nominee for Hope-In-The-Mist: The Extraordinary Career and Mysterious Life of Hope Mirrlees.

and

Patrick is a BEST EDITOR, LONG FORM nominee.

Back yesterday from Boston and Boskone 47: 12 hours and 10 minutes on the road, including 90 minutes crossing the border at Lewiston, with many other Ontarians at the end of Family Day. Note 1: next year, do not arrive at border at 5:15 p.m. Note 2: instead, cross at Rainbow Bridge.

Almost all of SFContario 1′s guests were at Boskone.

If during SFContario 1 you see Michael Swanwick with a thick notebook, ask him nicely and he will let you hold it and look through it. The academic institution that eventually acquires The Michael Swanwick Papers is in for a treat: much more interesting than a stack of compact disks or a thumb drive of files.

If you like semi-precious stones and polished fossils, you have a comment hook, in addition to writers, about which you can talk to Teresa Nielsen Hayden. Mary Ellen described Teresa’s necklaces as “stunning.”

And if you find yourself in a bar with Patrick Nielsen Hayden, you can offer to buy him a Guinness.

Geri Sullivan as one of the guests of SFContario 1 might be easier to find in one place for more than a few minutes, because she will be a guest. Or maybe not. During Boskone, to my knowledge, and I am sure this list is incomplete, on Friday she was involved in decorating the Zombie Casino and was in charge of the Reno in 2011 Worldcon party; Saturday she was a member of the crew during rehearsal of, and the subsequent performance of, the world premiere of Roger Zelazny’s three act play, Godson.