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Yes, I've been a slacker in terms of writing lately. Actually, I have gotten bits and pieces of things done, it's documented in my journal. Not that much to show in public, but that's somewhat of a good thing. I do need to work on my fiction.
- 2004 travel plans
June 25
- Article In Progress: 27 Hours to the Con
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If science fiction is the literature of ideas, science fiction fandom is the community of the literature of ideas, and I believe fandom plays a significant role in the intellectual leadership of society as a whole. I have an evangelical approach to fandom; not just "the more the merrier", but the more people that are thinking about tomorrow, the better tomorrow is likely to be. Once in a while this puts me into conflict with people who feel that fandom should be a quiet little club that doesn't need new members, but I have no problem expressing the argument against that paradigm.
Cascadia Con is the eighth North American Science Fiction Convention, organized under the sponsorship of the Seattle Westercon Organizing Committee. I will be working on programming for the convention.
Chicago in 2008 is a bid for the 66th World Science Fiction Convention. I am a member of the bid committee (one of some 30-odd people).
The USS Hudson Bay, incorporated as "Infinite Diversity International Corporation (IDIC)", is one of Canada's oldest science fiction fan clubs. Originally a Star Trek fan club, the club today has a strong focus on literary science fiction, with author readings at most monthly meetings. New members are welcome; feel free to attend on of our open public meetings.
I host the web sites www.idic.ca and voyageur.idic.ca. I also write for the Aurora-award-winning fanzine, The Voyageur. I joined the club in 2001.
Mensa Toronto is the local chapter of the international high-IQ society. New members are welcome. If you're interested in joining Mensa, click here.
I host the web site www.mensatoronto.on.ca, and I also help with media relations. I joined Mensa back in 1991, because I met some really nice people at local events.
I was chair of the Mensa Toronto Annual Gathering in 1994, and chair of the Mensa Annual Gathering in Canada in 1995, held in Toronto.
The Friends of the Merril Collection is a citizen advisory group to the Toronto Public Library Board in support of The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, and Fantasy, a reference collection of the Toronto Public Library. The mission of the organization is to provide a forum for members of the science fiction community to support the special collection.
I joined the Friends in 2001.
Torcon III was the 61st World Science Fiction Convention. I was the Deputy Division Head for Programming. I was also system administrator, and I helped with a lot of publications. During the bid, I acted as webmaster (maintaining web content) and I helped with bid parties.
I was program operations staff at Millennium Philcon and at ConJose, respectively the 59th World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia in September 2001 and the 60th WorldCon in San Jose in August 2002.
I was webmaster of the Bloody Words mystery conference in June 2002, as well as moderating a panel on cross-genre fiction.
I was a member of the concom of Toronto Trek from 1992-96, acting as Head of Guest Liaisons and a member of the convention executive from 1994-96.
I acted as a guest liaison at Primedia from 1995-96.
Of course, one of the purposes of this home page is to show that I know a little bit about creating online content. My first web page was posted in 1994 on Illuminati Online, which used to be a cool Internet site for gamers, and since has become a conventional ISP. One of the ironies is that I went online to find resources about writing, so I became involved with the misc.writing Usenet newsgroup for a couple of years. The result of this is that I got really good at explaining the Internet to people, so that I now do tech support for a living.
Most of my web content is either technical documentation on the company intranet, or references related to my unpublished fiction. But I do have a few things visible to the public Internet:
I maintain the convention list at SF Site. The convention list has over 500 events sorted by date, location, or category, and all links are manually validated at least once every six months. SF Site has been nominated for the "Best Web Site" Hugo award this year. I have maintained the convention list since 1996.
I will be webmaster for Bloody Words, the Canadian mystery convention, which is coming back to Toronto in June 2005. I was webmaster for this site back in 2002, the last time the con was in Toronto.
I completed an extensive update of the Crime Writers of Canada web site in the spring of 2003, and I put the Arthur Ellis award winners up recently.
I was webmaster for the Toronto in 2003 Worldcon bid; I also hosted the Torcon 3 web site and maintained the secure online registration for the convention.
I suppose I've really always been a gamer. I got every board game I could as a kid, I role-played with Lego men, as long as I can remember. In 1971 I got 1914 from Avalon Hill, and I became a wargamer. In 1975, I discovered Dungeons & Dragons in three little brown staple-bound books (5.5x8.5" format), and I became a role-player.
I became a playtester for GURPS in 1984. I later playtested GURPS Magic, GURPS Space, GURPS Supers, and other sourcebooks. I was asked to write Tredroy, a medieval urban setting in the world of Yrth which is ruled by three different kingdoms, which was a concept that really intrigued me. In 1990, I was asked to write a draft of GURPS Cyberpunk. GURPS Cyberpunk was involved in a landmark case against the United States Secret Service, in which the government lost on First and Fourth Amendment grounds. Though for me, what was significant were the reviews that said the netrunning system didn't work and it didn't have a world setting; these were the main components where my manuscript wasn't used at all.
Back in 1979, in order to try to make some sense out of the presentation of the order of demons in the AD&D Monster Manual, I wrote "The Politics of Hell", which was published in Dragon magazine #28 and later in The Best of Dragon, Vol. 2. I discovered DragonQuest and Universe in 1981, just before SPI went bankrupt, but I stayed in contact with Gerry Klug, who went to Victory Games and designed the James Bond 007 roleplaying game, which I helped playtest. I wrote an article on real-world intelligence agencies for one of the sourcebooks. I wrote an adventure based on the movie Moonraker, which tried to cut through some of the more illogical features of the movie. I had a band of six thousand commandos take over the spaceport at French Guyana, which was originally rejected as being too implausible, and then after the American invasion of Grenada was rejected as being too political. Victory Games started winding down the roleplaying side around then, so I got involved with Steve Jackson, who I was very impressed with from his work at Metagaming.
In 1994, I took a class in "Writing Science Fiction" with Karl Schroeder, and afterwards I joined the Ink*Specs writing circle in Toronto, hosted by Mici Gold and including Douglas Smith, Isaac Szpindel, Sue Witts, Lorraine Pooley, and Leah Bobet. (We miss Ken Basarke, a member of the circle who passed away in April, 2003.)
I've also studied with Caro Soles and Nika Rylski.
My current primary focus is a quasi-historical fantasy novel with the working title Traitor's Home.
People who know me know that I have opinions on many subjects. As time permits, I'll probably post a few thoughts here. In the meantime, if you're interested, read my journal.
I am studying for a degree in Information Technology Management at Ryerson University. I completed a certificate in Computer Programming from Ryerson in 2000. At work, I have been trained in Cisco routers and switches, Juniper routers, Redback ADSL routers, Ascend (Lucent) ISDN routers, Fore (Lucent) ATM switches, Lucent Access Point VPN devices, Nortel Contivity VPN gateways, and other network technologies, as well as UNIX (Solaris, FreeBSD, Linux), and Windows NT operating systems running mail (zmailer, sendmail, Communigate Pro), DNS (Bind), web (Apache and IIS), Usenet, and RADIUS servers, and a variety of management and other internal training courses.
Before working for WorldCom, I worked for Magic Online, once the premier online community of Macintosh users in Canada, where I did technical support and FirstClass server administration. From 1982 to 1995, I managed The Worldhouse, a well-known Toronto game store. Before that I worked as for Statistics Canada.
I live on the south side of Bellevue Park in Toronto's Kensington Market, which is the best block in the best neighborhood in the best city in the world to live. I met my wife Merle in 1980. Our common interests are SF conventions, gaming, good food, books, television, and travel. She is a top salesperson in the business sales department of a large communications company. We have cat, Bastet (officially "De Cat Bastet"). Our dog, Cusidhe, passed away in July, 2003. Most of my free time is spent writing or working on fannish or other volunteer activities, but for recreation, I watch a great deal of television, spend time with friends and family, read, play computer games, and travel. My ancestry is Irish on my mother's side, German, French, and English on my father's side.
Many of my relatives are engineers, with the next most common professions being educators, scientists, soldiers, politicians, and clergy; making the future a better place runs through our blood and bone. My uncle was a systems engineer seconded to NASA who helped design the mission schedule for Apollo XI; my great uncle was chief of field operations of the Manhattan Engineering District during the Second World War, helping to supervise the construction, testing, deployment, and after-action inspection of the first nuclear weapons. My great-great-uncle was a consulting engineer who helped design the first hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls. So I occasionally try to overcompensate for a sense of underachievement.
Comments, questions, suggestions welcome. Email me.
Copyright 2002, 2003, 2004 Alexander von Thorn.