ArmadilloCon 50: 2028 (My Proposals)

This was my cover letter to the FACT Board:

Dear Fen:

Attached as a PDF are some ideas that I have for the 50th Anniversary ArmadilloCon in 2028. What actually gets done will likely be much different from these points of discussion and that is the reason why the planning should be begin as soon as possible. Here in Texas we are often “fixin’ to start”—not actually doing the thing but knowing that we need to get ready to. 

I have been going through our archives by editing the show URLs (schedule, speakers, etc.).

Just for instance:

https://armadillocon.org/d16/

https://armadillocon.org/d27/

https://armadillocon.org/d32/guests.shtml

https://armadillocon.org/d36/writers.shtml

Then, I found the Con History on the FACT website: 

https://fact.org/con-history/

The array of past guests of honor, attending authors, presenters, speakers, and events is astounding and has analogs with every other long-lived SF/F gathering within the galaxy of science fiction, fantasy, and alternative fiction. That all comes with a burden of responsibility to the future.

LLP,

Mike M.

This was the proposal that I submitted.

ArmadilloCon 50 in the Year 2028

Submitted to the FACT Board October 11, 2025, 

by Michael E. Marotta (uszik11@gmail.com; books78640@gmail.com)

FACT should form now a convention committee for ArmadilloCon 50. It will of necessity change over the next three years, as people come and go. Open discussions should start now. A website, discussion board, Substack, or whatever should be launched now to facilitate interest and stimulate enthusiasm, by encouraging suggestions. Put out a call to FACT members to volunteer for the 50th Anniversary Committee, perhaps limited to eight (if that many are interested.)

Convention Theme: 

The Psychohistorians. What are our future histories? It is easy to imagine many paths of development given some selected assumptions. However, Isaac Asimov’s conception of psychohistory was a science of applied mathematics. To be a science, a body of knowledge must be falsifiable, which means that it must offer predictions from outside its own establishment.

Convention Theme:

Frankenstein. Arguably not science fiction, the story does carry the program of The Other, whether from another planet or a parallel universe, whether a robot or a dragon, to ask, “What is human nature?” Perhaps quintessential to science fiction, Frankenstein is the story of an invention gone wrong. 

Convention Theme:

Alternate sciences. Allowing that even magick has rules, what are the frontiers of science (or sorcery) that can provide the set and setting for a story? 

Attendance Goal: 1000 registered at $100 each.

Panels and Tracks

Artist Track — We talk a lot about the craft of writing and the markets for publications but we seem to pretty much leave artists on their own. We do have plenty of artists around. Perhaps a track for them or a couple of panels for media and markets would add a dimension to the convention.

Copyrights and Copy Wrongs

I heard that one of the publishers of anthologies failed to actually register their copyrights for their authors and many works were taken without compensation. The USA joined the Berne Convention in 1985 and that treaty gives authors and other creatives their primary rights but those are only the right to sue after the fact. In the USA we still should register with the US Copyright Office. Unfortunately, that office is now closed. What can an author or artist do to protect their intellectual property ?

Social Consequences of Life Extension.

As we all live longer and ever longer, do we push out to seek those famous new frontiers or do we become more conservative, less willing to take risks, more distrustful of change?

TV and Film Writers You Need to Know.

Laurel and I watched an episode of Castle, about a mystery writer who insinuates himself into police investigations, a known trope in crime fiction. In this story, the non-real writer, Rick Castle, is playing poker with Stephen J. Cannell and James Paterson. I knew Cannell from The A-Team and Riptide, etc., but not Paterson. Laurel knew Paterson but not Cannell.

Convention Publication

ArmadilloCon 100. Austin in the Year 2078. Ten flash fiction stories of 1000 words each by ten invited authors from our GoH roster (or others). Offer $100 each and see who is interested. 

Panel Moderators and Other Guests of Honor

Send out a Request for Proposals, asking writers and others to submit their bids to be at ArmadilloCon 50. 

Ahead of ArmadilloCon 50, we could engage some new practices and have the wrinkles ironed out for the big show.

A message board. At computer security conferences here in Austin, OWASP often puts up a flipchart on a tripod where people can leave messages for each other. At ArmadilloCon 47, I worked the Registration desk and on Saturday morning, someone wanted to leave a message for another attendee and I made note of that and kept that half-sized sheet until Sunday afternoon. Cleaning up, I threw it out. Then the recipient arrived looking for a message. 

A tech station for printing, etc. The hotel typically has its own workstation for guests, but those are notoriously insecure. This year, the hotel workstation was down for remodeling. Jonathan ran out and bought a tablet, but the team could not get it up and running properly. 

Convention T-Shirts. We have had Pegasus Publishing as a dealer for several years. They can handle our T-shirt production and sales. Moreover, they could have been selling prior year t-shirts for which, as I understand from a chance comment overheard in the last hours of the show this year, we have no interest and no market and just give them away so as not to be bothered with the extra inventory. 

Convention Coffee Cups. Reach out and see if LG Ceramics is interested. I believe that if they had five (and only five) Convention cups at the next show, those would sell out and create the market for the cups of the following year. Otherwise, these things can be ordered dishwasher safe and microwave safe from many places.

Having received the proposal but not having a motion to act on, the chair agreed to put ArmadilloCon 50 2028 in the Old Business section of the Minutes for the November meeting. 

I sent another email to the FACT Board, and cc:ed some of the past convention workers who might be interested, such as the FlashFiction coordinator.

Convention Publication

ArmadilloCon 100. Austin in the Year 2078. Ten flash fiction stories of 1000 words each by ten invited authors from our GoH roster (or others). Offer $100 each and see who is interested.

I brought my checkbook to the Board meeting and I was prepared to pay for the writers for this Festschrift but we never got that far into the discussion of the 50th Anniversary Convention because we ran out of time.

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FRANKENSTEIN, RAYGUNS, AND BICYCLES

I read for research. This past Christmas break, I read formal philosophy. From 2021 through 2024, I read a lot of astronomy, several of those books cover-to-cover. But I do try fiction. I do not always succeed. I read at bedtime and therefore the sprints are short. Perhaps more to the point, I prefer to read authors who write better than I do and I have no patience for anyone who cannot outdo me because I know that I am not that good at it which is why I do not write fiction. However, as Montag said in Fahrenheit 451, inside each book is a man. So, I give the author a fair chance. 

At ArmadilloCon 47 this past September 12-14, I was working in the Convention Suite and two of the fen (not “fans”) were chatting. “Of course, I read Frankenstein,” said the one. Replied the other, “The 1818 or the 1819 version?” I was loading ice so I missed the rest, but I did check out two editions from the UT Perry-Castañeda Library. The book is nothing like the movies. (I have not seen the newest release from Guillermo del Toro.) 

• Frankenstein : the 1818 edition with related texts / Mary Shelley ; edited, with introduction and notes, by David Wootton. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851, author.; Wootton, David, 1952- editor.
• The annotated Frankenstein / Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley ; edited by Susan Wolfson and Ronald Levao. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851.; Wolfson, Susan J., 1948-; Levao, Ronald. 2012.

The proper title is Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. In my opinion, Mary Shelly failed to complete the analogy. Moreover, that context was not explored in any of the editions or criticisms that I found at the UT library. 

Prometheus (Forethought) was tasked by Zeus with creating animals to inhabit the Earth. His brother, Epimetheus  (Afterthought), gave all of them the strength, speed, agility, powerful talons, fangs, hides, horns, etc., etc., leaving Man with not much else. Prometheus gave Man intelligence — and fire. For that, he was chained to a mountain in the Caucasus and his liver was torn out by a vulture, only to regenerate overnight and be torn out again. We experience the tremors of his suffering as earthquakes. Mary Shelley did not carry through the many possible parallels. 

What does project to the reader is the dual nature of the monster. He is completely innocent, teaching himself to understand language, speech first and then writing. He discovers music, first in birds then from the old man in the cottage. He is vegetarian, subsisting on roots, leaves, and berries, sometimes cooking them after he learns (by accident) fire. He wants to be liked and loved but his horrendous form—eight feet tall and made from inanimate matter brought to life—draws only terror, rebuke, revulsion, and violence from everyone around him. He pays the world back in kind, at first killing a child then turning his attention to Victor Frankenstein’s family. Frankenstein pursues the monster to the North Pole but dies and the monster drifts off on an ice flow, promising to immolate himself. By Aristotle’s theory, the fable must be a tragedy, a story about a being brought down by circumstances not of his own choice but of his own making. 

Rayguns over Texas was published in 2013 by FACT the Fandom Association of Central Texas. It contains 19 short stories and eight essays. I bought my copy at my first ArmadilloCon (39) in 2017. The book disappeared into storage boxes when we moved from Austin to Kyle. Looking for something else, I found it and I now know some of these authors. So, I started with those stories. 

“Texas Died for Somebody’s Sins But Not Mine” by Stina Leicht is another Frankenstein story. This retelling has been informed by decades of science fiction and political theory. This monster is a transgenetic clone labelled “Dallas” and called “Una” who works as a computer programmer and is the legal property of a corporation. She is harmless and truly a victim. She escapes the software factory for one night of selfish pleasure. When she slips back in, she learns that she had been discovered. It does not matter on two grounds: this project is closing, so she was going be erased and reprogrammed with different skills anyway; and against that she knows that she had her own life for a short time, even though she will not remember any of it. 

I believe that “Operators are Standing By” by Rhonda Eudaly is a personal story told through aliens. Set in a galactic sales call center, it is about belonging. If you saw Boiler Room or Wall Street, you get the picture. Moreover, Fahrenheit 451’s Montag would say that this is autobiographical and is on a narrative level forbidden in his society. 

Of these first three stories, I found "Jump the Black" by Marshall Ryan Maresca to be the most emotionally engaged. The viewpoint character is an illegal alien, a Terran seeking to get off the Deathplanet which we turned Earth into. Imagine a world of homeless people, living on whatever is left of the streets, paying smugglers to get them anyplace else. Many die along the way. That’s how it is. Keep moving. 

After I finished the three-part review of ArmadilloCon 47 last month, I left messages in the contact pages of the websites of the vendors, authors, and fans whom I mentioned. Panelist Lauren Teffeau replied with corrections to my blog post. Reading her website, I discovered the Solar Punk subgenre in which home-brew solutions remediate some of the environmental sins of our time. From the libraries at the University of Texas (Austin), the City of Austin, and the City of Kyle, the closest I could come was Bike Topia: Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction in Extreme Futures, volume 4 of the Bikes in Space series from Microcosm Publishing. 

The narrative style of “Riding in Place” by Sarena Ulibarri is matter-of-fact, unadorned writing. So, I just followed the story and I did not foresee the (surprise) conclusion. It is another smuggled alien story told from an outside viewpoint as we follow our human corporate worker on an industrial space station orbiting Earth. I was reminded of Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net which opens with a middle class corporate office work gang ripping up old telecom lines and patching the landscape.They do the job they are given but they don’t have much enthusiasm for it: “it’s community work,” they say. In Sarena Ulibarri’s utopia of megacity biking trails and parkways, everybody gets assigned some tough jobs and working on the space station is one of them. Hence the bicycles to maintain bone strength. 

Maddy Spencer’s "Meet Cute" is a graphic flash story with neither narration nor dialog. The pictures tell the story. Montag would have read this before he discovered books. 

"Portlandtown" by editor Elly Blue weaves the threads of self-discovery within a tapestry of complex future sociology told as history. 

The stories in BikeTopia are fresh. The plots are the ones we know from The Bible and The Iliad and Shakespeare. The tellings are new and now. 

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Dealers Make the Show: ArmadilloCon 41 Day 3 

 

The Roots of Language

I call the inflection point in human history when thinkers gave structure to the words in their heads the Grammatical Revolution. 

We easily find the roots of science fiction in mythology because we commonly accept that people - perhaps protohumans - told wondrous tales around the campfire. However, that may not be so. The IndoEuropean languages are no more than eight thousand years old, and perhaps only half that. Estimates for the oldest possible forms of Chinese (protoSinitic) are perhaps half again as old as protoIndoEuropean. It may be easy to accept that the purpose of language is communication with other people because human language evolved from animal calls. Ravens and crows are notorious talkers with large vocabularies, including gestures. However, that is not the primary purpose of language. 

The primary purpose of language is to enable thinking. Thinking is private. Alone on an island, you would have no one to talk to. Your survival would depend on the contents of your mind. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithuanian_grammar
It has been said (not in Wikipedia) that Lithuanian has retained
more proto-IndoEuropean forms than other IE languages.

And there had to be a "first thinker." I believe that rather than solitary they were a pair of females who invented their own grammar to deliver nuance to their speech. Then they taught it to their children, preferentially to their daughters. Succeeding generations added complex rules in order to better explain their sensory perceptions and mental conceptions. "I see them take your new food to her yonder fire." 

Counting only 1-2-Many, the PIE Caucasians all borrowed their word for "seven" from their Semitic neighbors.

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Sandor Kőrösi Csoma

Spoken American Grammar

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Money as a Crusoe Concept

ArmadillioCon 47 - Part 3

However scholars argue the origins of science fiction, it cannot have preceded science. Although the word "science" as referring to some area of knowledge was used from the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, it was only at the first meeting of the British Association of the Advancement of Science on June 24, 1833, that William Whewell answered a challenge from Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and spontaneously offered the word “scientist.” Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is often suggested as a science fiction story. However, for his "Introduction" to Hackett Publishing Co., Inc.'s 2020 republication of the 1818 manuscript, David Wooton cited Mary Shelley's feather pen as supporting evidence for the lack of science in the story.

Among the first panels on Friday night at ArmadilloCon 47 was "Speculative Geology" and among the last was "Space Tries to Kill You" chaired by NASA trainer Bill Frank. Between those two pillars the convention also provided a range of engagements for readers and writers of scifi, fantasy, horror, and other alternative genres. On that note, it has been said that scifi is the modern genre of fiction and what others call "mainstream fiction" is historical fiction set in the present. 

In Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Steven Levy drew a contrast between those on the East Coast and  those on the West. Centered on Boston, one group created the video game "Spacewar" whereas the hackers around San Francisco built J. R. R. Tolkien's world into Adventure programs that became Dungeons & Dragons. Today, fantasy, science fiction, horror, and gaming are all to be found at ArmadilloCon. 

This year the gaming was in Room 102 with four events. 

• Alta Curia - based on "12 Angry Men"
• Nicky Drayden's "Prosper with Dragons"
• Not Today, Murder
• Jess Nevin's "Fury of the Norsemen"

Previous ArmadilloCons have been gamier, among them

• https://www.armadillocon.org/d36/gaming.shtml 
• https://www.armadillocon.org/d29/gaming/index.htm
• https://www.fact.org/dillo/d20/gaming.html

In the ArmadilloCon Dealers Room,
the premiere convention in central Texas for
tabletop role-playing and board games. 
May 29-31, 2026
https://tabletop.events/conventions/chupacabracon-xii

I met Heidi Kasa while I was working the Registration Desk. The next day, she stopped by again to hand me her card. She said that she was here for the flash fiction. (Two events - Thunderdome at 9:00 PM on Friday and Space Squid at 1:00 PM Saturday.) 

The Bullet Takes Forever

On her website she writes:

The Bullet Takes Forever is a collection of poems facing “America’s culture of mass shootings.” The poems range from processing a mother's personal experiences with active shooter situations to philosophical, psychological, and linguistic explorations of gun violence. At turns yearning, vulnerable, and fierce, this collection resonates with readers who feel the effects of rising gun violence and the need for increased safety measures. Poems from this collection won the Plaza Prose Poetry 2024 Prize and the Poetry Super Highway 2023 Prize, and were also chosen as a finalist for the ESWA Crossroads Contest 2024. 

 

Nothing expresses your preferences in subcultures like a t-shirt. Unfortunately for the merchant, they are nearly non-perishable and surely non-consumable. I probably have 30 and if I wear a different one every day, how often will I bring a new one into the rotation? 

Pegasus Publishing travels to 35 shows a year.
I bought the design that he is wearing --
42: Life, Universe, Everything -- 
for Laurel.
https://pegasuspublishing.com/

I have three from Pegasus,: Don't Panic, a Periodic Table, and Book Wyrm. Book Wyrm is the best. Made in Haiti by Gildan, the material is heavy for a T-shirt, more like an athletic T. It is 100% cotton. The screen printing is bright and has proved durable. It wears well at the local public library. 

More books have resulted from somebody's need to write than from anybody's need to read. -- Ashleigh Brilliant.

Kurt and Michelle met in college playing
Dungeons & Dragons.
Kurt has served on the FACT Board
and been our Fan Guest of Honor.
He invited me to attend ArmadilloCon several times
before I understood the message.

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ArmadilloCon 47, part 2.

ArmadilloCon is produced by FACT: Fandom Association of Central Texas. "The Fandom Association of Central Texas, Inc. is a Texas non-profit educational organization dedicated to the promotion of science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction, and the appreciation of science.." 

In Bruce Sterling's Schizmatrix, within the vast but thin human realm of our solar system there is a spaceship which is also recognized as an independent nation. I find FACT to be a lot like that. This is the link to the FACT Organization Chart, Board of Directors, Corporate Officers, and Convention Committee. Not bad for a club with fewer than 50 members. I was elected to the Board last year but my best service is just showing my appreciation for their Writers Workshop and Flash Fiction contest and advertising in the show guide. 

Entrance of the Fans into the Dealers Room
Saturday morning.

Plot Bunnies Ate My Brain

Every year at the free literature table, I found cute notepads and other writerly chachkas from Rhonda Eudaly. "Plot Bunnies Ate My Brain." On her blog, she wrote:

I badly quote an previous Poli-Sci professor my mom worked for and I took a couple of classes with. He said (ish), to be a “professional” writer you had to either 1. be paid or 2. get 200 rejections, whichever comes first.

Pretty sure I’ve gotten both of those things. And yet, with my publishing gap (much like employment gaps), it feels like I’ve been reset to zero. I have stories out. Got 3 rejections last week alone – maybe four? There’s a rejection that’s unclear because I realized I had 2 stories with the same market (oops – still getting back on that bicycle) and the rejection didn’t specify WHICH (or BOTH) were rejected. I’m erring on the side of…both.

[...]It sounds an awful lot a “partly cloudy” day, where you see more clouds than sun, but the sun is still dominant. 

https://www.rhondaeudaly.com/
Rhonda Eudaly with show scheduler Ryan Marshall Mareska.

Persephone Station and Loki's Ring

Last year (ArmadilloCon 46), I served on a panel with Stina Leicht (pronounced ungermanically as "Light").  Stina did most of the talking as we argued the future of generative AI while two other panelists tried to get a word in. At ArmadilloCon 41, Stina moderated “The Perfect Heist: Crime in the 23rd Century” wherein David Afrarishad, Rob Rogers, Michael Bracken, Rebecca Roanhorse and I robbed a space station. I was the wheelman. We got away with it. 

Stina Leicht reading a passage from the Persephone Station series.
https://www.csleicht.com/

This year, I sat in on one of her readings. I bought Loki's Ring a couple of years ago. So, I had some context. Stina said that she likes a "Star Trek" style universe where people's basic needs are met and the bad guys are libertarians. I think that Stina has a libertarian streak of her own and that she is exactly the kind of person who would be miserable in the socialist utopia of Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed.  

When Space Tries to Kill You

Again this year, I attended "Space Tries to Kill You" chaired by NASA trainer Bill Frank with support from Beth Anderson, William Ledbetter, Jayme Lynn Blaschke, and Paige Ewing. Bill Frank read off scenarios, rotating the first responders around the table. 

One time, I was with some Army guys watching Women's Field Hockey, 

and one guy said, "It's amazing that this sport is not more popular."

The first challenge was one we had before: You are cleaning an air filter when the fire alarm goes off. What do you do? The standard answer is always: Warn; Gather; Work. Report the problem to everyone immediately. Get everyone into the safest place(s). Address the problem from known (or creative) response scenarios. In this case, the panelists were ahead of the curve. Whatever you did to the air filter, stop doing that. They also discussed the importance of oxygen to you and to the fire. And so on... The answer is that you probably tripped the fire alarm when you released a cloud of dust cleaning the filters. 

Beth Anderson admitted that she was a panelist because the scheduler, Marshall Mareska, said that she would like it. Beth writes horror fiction and does read scifi. I thought that she did well, being an insightful and original thinker who knows tons of basic science. Bill Ledbetter had a career in aerospace before that was eclipsed by writing science fiction. Jayme Lynn Blashke was the convention Toastmaster this year. Scifi is just one thing that he does and it does not rank up there with "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas" (https://www.jaymeblaschke.com/). 

I corralled Paige E. Ewing after the session and we chatted for about 20 minutes. She got into this aspect of the business by designing a self-contained greenhouse and proposing it to NASA which thanked her with an award in 2013. See https://paigeewing.com/ for the fantasy and romance novelist, Paige E. Ewing. Find "Marvin's Lunchbox" on YouTube and find out how to grow edible algae on Mars here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oialhSOzCzQ

Problem 2: You have to drive from Austin to Denver and your choices are a Tesla RoboTaxi in which you have no control whatsoever and a used Dodge with steering and all that but a bad transmission. The analogy is the difference between the Tesla Dragon and the Boeing CST-100 Starliner. 

Problem 3: You are on the International Space Station and a piece of space junk cuts into your shell. You have five hours of air. What do you do? 

Problem 3B: You are on the Boeing Starliner and a piece of space junk cuts your shell and you have five hours of air. 

Problem 5: It is the middle of the night and you have to go to the bathroom but it is noisy and will wake everyone else up.

The last problem was that you are being tracked by an anti-satellite missile launched from the ground. 

All in all, the panelists did well and Bill Frank had to disappoint them only a couple of times.

THE VAN SHOW from the Austin Public Library

Austin Public Library Van Show on YouTube

ArmadilloCon 50

We have two tables of free handouts - see the Plot Bunnies above - and I placed handouts calling attention to the fact that ArmadilloCon 50 is in 2029 and suggesting that at the next FACT Board Meeting we should form a committee to plan for that. 

My write-ups on this blog can only have delivered some of the many flavors, aspects, angles, views, and feelings of ArmadilloCon. The experience is necessarily individual. It is a surprisingly small con: Paid attendance 220; 100 invited guests; 25 dealers. (Also 33 no-show registered attendees including five panelist no-shows.) Dealer tables pay for most of this with registration only adding to the cash flow. The con also sells t-shirts, this year designed by Artist Guest of Honor Sara Felix. 

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ArmadilloCon 41 

Fantastic Voyages: Teaching Science with Science Fiction 

Monsters from the Id 

The Audacity of Entrepreneurship

Forbidden Planet