Tonopah Stands Alone

[kevin_standlee]

While cleaning up the Westercon history page and adding the necessary new footnotes to explain what happened to Westercon 73 Seattle and how it will be folded into Loscon 47, I was hit by a revelation: Westercon 74 will be the first standalone Westercon in eight years. Every Westercon from 2014 through 2021 (there was no convention last year, of course) was/will be combined with some other convention. Now sometimes the combination was Westercon with something larger, like with the 2019 NASFiC, and sometimes the combination went the other way with Westercon hosting other conventions like ConChord. But from Westercons 67 through 73, it was always a combined convention. Westercon 74 in Tonopah will not be combined with anything else. We stand on our own. I hope we get the 200-400 people to join us that we're planning for.

Comments

[jcfiala]

I'm planning on coming out. I had fun meeting you at the Denver Worldcon, and I'm looking forward to seeing you again.

[kevin_standlee]

Why, thank you! I hope you have a good time and that you'll budget time to look around Tonopah outside of the convention. I really hope lots of people go look at the Tonopah Mining Park and the Central Nevada Museum, both of which I find fascinating.

And while I'm thinking of it, are there any things you might be interested in volunteering to help with the convention? While it's lower-key than most, we'll still all need to chip in. We're trying to make it more like older Westercons, where everyone pays and everyone plays.

[scott_sanford]

I was told at the time that not all of the GearCon attendees got the word before showing up for the event; expecting a tiny steampunk convention they instead found themselves mixing with 1500 other people. Westercon 69 may have spoiled some of them.