WindyCon

A Weekend at WindyCon

         By Rob Langenderfer

          On November 13, 2015 Donna Madden and I journeyed to Chicago to attend WindyCon.  WindyCon is a long-running general science fiction convention that is focused around SF books.  It was a convention that I had planned to go to in 2014 that many other Cincinnati Fantasy Group members were attending and had been at frequently in the past.   However, things did not work out for me to attend that year, and I had my membership (which had been given to me as a 40^th birthday present) rolled over to the next year. 

          This year it did work out for me to go.  My dear, sweet wonderful friend Donna Madden was interested in going to a SF convention with me.  It would be her first convention ever and she was excited.  She was taking a very difficult math class, and she decided that she could not skip class and go up Thursday morning with the CFG group, so we decided to go up on Friday morning. It took a fair amount of time, but we ended up getting there in around 6 hours.   

          We got to the convention in time to hear the last part of a panel on religion in SF, which was quite interesting.  Then we went to the dealer’s room, which was truly the highlight of the convention for me.  I had not seen a dealer’s room that was so tailored to my interests since Millennicon in 1995 and 1997 and arguably Visions 93.  I ended up buying 24 books and did not pay more than $6 for any one of them!  There were so many fantastic used SF paperbacks that I thought I would never see, like the second volume of the James Gunn-edited anthology The Road to Science Fiction.  (Donna was also able to find the 4^th volume of The Road to Science Fiction, which I bought!)  It was wonderful to find and buy The Mammoth Book of Jack the Ripper for Donna for she is a horror enthusiast and has always been fascinated by Jack the Ripper.  The Road to Dune by Frank Herbert, Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson was another stellar find as was paperback edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.  I also bought a number of other SF anthologies and alternate history anthologies and a couple more of Eric Flint’s novels, getting them autographed and some of Mike Resnick’s anthologies, getting them autographed.  It was a great chance to finally obtain some of the classic SF that I had heard about for years but had not had the chance to read.  It was great to obtain an anthology of SF plays that included Harlan Ellison’s original screenplay for his Star Trek episode “City on the Edge of Forever.”  There were many book dealers there and not just a single new book dealer or two as has been the case with too many SF conventions that I have attended recently.  It was a wonderful adventure just seeing all that they had.

          The panels that we went to at the convention were OK.  Eric Flint’s talk on his forthcoming works was particularly good.  There weren’t many that were awe-inspiring or even memorable.  Still, it was nice to see the wide diversity of topics that were discussed. 

          Friends from the CFG were there: Megen Leigh and Lonni Addis and Bill Cavin and Drew McDonald and Mike Resnick and Joel Zackem and all of the Donat family, but we didn’t come across them as often as I thought we would, and we were never able to connect with Megen and Lonni to hang out because Lonni never saw our Facebook message. Cookie Rojas and Frank Johnson were there, but we never saw them at all.  We were able to have a very nice lunch one day with Donna’s friends Natalie and David McGary and their children.  We wished we could have gone to the Harry Carey restaurant that was attached to the hotel, but it was much too expensive.  The food in the convention suite was good, and we had a couple of nice meals on our trip.

          We headed back on Sunday afternoon, and the trip took longer than we anticipated, particularly with stopping at Shoney’s for dinner.  We did not make it back in time for Mass at Thomas More, but I remembered hearing that Xavier University had a 10 P.M. Mass, and after a number of wrong turns, we made it there in time.  We made it home right around midnight. 

          Donna had a great time at the convention and was eager to go to future ones.  I had a wonderful time too.  WindyCon brought back a great deal of the joy of some of my earliest SF conventions and gave me a sense of excitement that I thought I might not ever receive from a convention again after having gone to more than 40 of them.  

            

Thanks to SBK member, Rob, for the review of WindyCon!