Balticon Events
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Welcome to Balticon!Join members of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society as we embark on the fifty-second year of Balticon, the premier non-profit fan-run Science Fiction Convention in the Mid-Atlantic region. We’ll have multiple tracks of Programming over the four day weekend, featuring authors, artists, scientists, musicians, podcasters, publishers, editors, costumers and other creative SF luminaries. Visit our Art Show and Dealers Room, attend one of our concerts or a dance, or take a break in the Gaming room or Video or Anime Room if you can tear yourself away from our entertaining and educational panels. Attend a Writer’s or Poetry Workshop, watch the Masquerade, or learn a new craft. Balticon is held annually from Friday through Monday of Memorial Day Weekend. For 2018 the dates are May 25-28. Like the last two years, Balticon will take place in the Renaissance Harborplace Hotel in downtown Baltimore just across the street from the inner harbor and the docks.
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Preliminary Announcement – Balticon 52 – May 25-28, 2018
Guest of Honor: Catherine Asaro
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Catherine Asaro has written more than 25 books in science fiction, fantasy, and near-future thrillers. She earned her doctorate in chemical physics and master’s in physics, both at Harvard. Her works The Quantum Rose and The Spacetime Pool are both Nebula® Award winners. Among her other distinctions, she is a multiple winner of the AnLab from Analog Magazine and the RT BOOKClub Award for “Best Science Fiction Novel.” Her most recent books are Undercity (Baen) and Lighting Strike, Book II. Her latest book, The Bronzed Skies, came out from Baen in 2016. A former ballet and jazz dancer, Catherine has performed on both coasts and in Ohio. As a musician, she performs at various cons and jazz clubs. She has appeared at cons and other venues as a Guest of Honor or author guest in the US and abroad. For more information, see her Facebook page at www.facebook.com/Catherine.Asaro. |
Artist Guest of Honor: Galen Dara
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Galen Dara has created art for Uncanny Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, Fireside Fiction Magazine, Fantasy Flight Games, Subterranean Press, Tyche Books and Strange Horizons. She won the 2016 World Fantasy award, a 2017 Spectrum Award, a 2017 Chesley Award and has been nominated for the Hugo and Locus Awards. When Galen is not working on a project you can find her on the edge of the Sonoran Desert, climbing mountains and hanging out with a friendly conglomeration of human and animal companions. She’s on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter @galendara. www.galendara.com |
Filk Guest of Honor: Tim Griffin
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Tim Griffin taught all subjects in Title-1 elementary schools in Los Angeles for 18 years before giving up his tenure to start Griffin Education Solutions, better known as GriffinEd. He loves writing and sharing new music with kids and seeing how they not only get excited about the STEM and other subjects we teach, but actually perform better on standards-based assessments of their knowledge and vocabulary when they work with our music. Tim has performed to great hilarity and edification for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Science Teachers’ Association, the California Science Teachers’ Association, Mensa, dozens of science fiction & filk conventions, plus a few hundred schools, libraries, museums, and other places of learning. In 2014, Tim won the Pegasus Award for best songwriter/ composer. |
Special Guest: Neil Clarke
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Neil Clarke is best known as the editor and publisher of the Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning magazine, Clarkesworld. Since 2015, he has also edited Forever, a digital-only reprint science fiction magazine. His anthologies include Upgraded, Galactic Empires, and the Best Science Fiction of the Year series for Night Shade Books. His next anthology, More Human than Human, will be published in November and followed by Clarkesworld Magazine A 10th Anniversary Anthology in December. Prior to becoming a full-time editor, he was a programmer, bookseller, and educational technologist. He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons. |
Fan Guest of Honor: Filthy Pierre(Erwin S. Strauss)
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Filthy Pierre (Erwin S. Strauss) got into fandom at MIT in the mid-1960s. He published the “Index to the SF Magazines 1951-1965.” He caused a stir by publishing the MIT SF Society’s collection of underground campus songs, and trying to import pirated textbooks. He became a fixture at East Coast cons, playing the piano at filksings. From 1974 to 1996, he published “The SF Convention Register.” From 1979 to the present, he’s done the “SF Conventional Calendar” for Asimov’s SF. From 1975 to 1983, he published the Microfilk, a compendium of filksongs in ridiculously tiny type. Erwin is in the Filk Hall of Fame, has received the Big Heart service award, is a Fellow of the New England Science Fiction Association, and received a Special Noreascon Four Award for contributions to the fan community. He can be recognized by his iridescent “Filthy Pierre” badge, and his mouth-powered organ. |
2017 Compton Crook Award Winner: Ada Palmer
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Ada Palmer grew up in Annapolis MD and attended the Key School, then the Bryn Mawr School in Baltimore. Ada Palmer is the 2017 Compton Crook winner for her first science fiction novel Too Like the Lightning (just released by Tor Books, 2016), a tale of global politics in the year 2454. She recently won the 2017 John Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She is an historian of the Renaissance, Enlightenment, classical reception, the history of books, publication and reading, and the history of philosophy, heresy, science and atheism. She teaches in the History Department at the University of Chicago, and researches in Italy, often in Florence or at the Vatican Library. She is the composer for Sassafrass, an a cappella group performing fantasy, SF and mythology-themed music, and her Viking musical play “Sundown: Whispers of Ragnarok” came out on CD and DVD in 2015. She researches anime/manga, especially Osamu Tezuka, early post-WWII manga and gender in manga. She has published on the history of manga and worked as a consultant for many anime and manga publishers. She writes the philosophy & travel blog ExUrbe.com.
Award Winning Book: Too Like The LightningMycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets. Carlyle Foster is a sensayer—a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away. |
Plus:
2018 Compton Crook Award Winner & 2018 Heinlein Award Winner
Other Guests TBA.