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.

EDIT IN: November 9. Yesterday, I took this proposal to the FACT Board. 

Last month, I submitted a proposal for ArmadilloCon 50 in 2028. In that was this item:

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.

Once again, I will bring my checkbook and I will give FACT the $1000 required now

only on the condition that I be the publisher. I also request that the Board choose an

Editor. The editor will choose the writers. I will write a Preface for it. Whether it is print,

ebook, etc., can be developed as the production advances. If FACT cannot find an editor

by the February Board meeting, I will reach out and find someone from within the Texas

SF/F community.

If the Board does not want to do this, I can do it on my own. I cannot use the names

ArmadilloCon or DilloCon, etc., etc., and I do not need to. I can call it Austin 2078.

I started in 1963 with lead type on a Chandler Press (https://

necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2017/09/for-glory-of-old-lincoln-high.html). I last edited

"This Month in Astronomical History" for the American Astronomical Society for four

years (2020-2024)(https://had.aas.org/resources/astro-history).

This requires Board action and I am not a Board member. So, someone else must put

forward the item.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

LLP,

Mike M.

No motion was entered.  So, this morning, I started looking for writers. 

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Analytics and Metrics for this Site

A friend asked me about the numbers here and I had to go into the analytics to refresh my memory because I write for myself. Creating technical documentation for industry, business, and government, I get paid to create content that other people ask for. This blog publishes what I want. Of course, I also write to be read. 

I shut off comments several years ago when cleaning out spam got to be real work. (“Great post! See BuyThisProduct dot com.”). The most recent tally is that since January 2, 2011, this blog has garnered 779,696 page views: not bad for a site with seven subscribers; and I never bother with search engine optimization. 

Everyone else’s favorites are not mine. I remain satisfied with the original ideas that motivated me. Among those are Money as a Crusoe Concept (January 2, 2011) and then Supplies and Demands (November 25, 2011). I could promote 20 others as significant to myself. I remember deleting one post but I do not recall which that was. I do make anonymous grammatical corrections. However, notable updates are clearly identified with strikethroughs or other editorial markup. 

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The Lightbulb Does Not Need to be Changed.

Q: How many sociologists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: The lightbulb does not need changing. It is society that must be changed.

 

I thought that I might pursue a doctorate here at the University of Texas because the school will pay for up to 5 credit hours per semester for an employee. The plan died aborning. I sent a letter to the sociology department and received a rejection in 15 minutes. The essential message was, “Go away.” 

My Query Letter

The Reply

 

When I was majoring in criminology at Eastern Michigan University, I had a lot of sociology classes, of course. One of my classmates was about a year ahead of me and we had a couple of classes together for a couple of semesters. One day, walking in from the parking lot, he asked me, “Why do think that conflict theory is the one they teach best here?” I did not understand the question.

Has a special interest in criminology

Conflict theory is among about 50 explanatory or predictive narratives that describe the facts about individuals in society. Pure conflict says that individuals are naturally aggressive toward each other and society (reified) holds us together by means of its institutions by preventing, mediating, remediating, or negating conflict. Variations include class conflict, gender conflict, race conflict, and others. Those become “critical” when they assert that the conflict is unnatural. Critical class conflict theory is congruent with Marxism, for example: fix society’s problems and conflict will abate and perhaps disappear entirely. But I could tell that my friend was asking a rhetorical question. And he asked another: “Why don’t we have a department chair?”

 

Has a special interest in criminal justice reform.

At EMU, sociology, anthropology, and criminology were all under the same office in the College of Arts & Sciences. At that time, no one wanted to be the chair. You would think that any tenure track professor would take the two-year rotation, even if they had been the chair perhaps ten years earlier. But no. As a new undergraduate, I was not in stream with the idle chat about department politics, but I knew that some of my professors were unhappy with their organizational leadership. Then came the defining crisis: a murder on campus.

 

Has a special interest in law and regulation.

As I recall, there was a general mandate from the University administration to all professors and staff not to talk to the press or other news media. But they are called “press” for several reasons and the reporters pressed the criminology department for quotable quotes. And my professor for White Collar Crime (Crim 307), Andreas Tomaszewski, offered his opinion. Then, his application for tenure was denied. He did still show up for class, but he basically stopped teaching. At the end of the semester, he moved to Canada. 

 

Has a special interest in juries.
I wonder if she has read
Young S. Kim, Gregg Barak, and Donald E. Shelton
from Eastern Michigan University on the CSI Effect.

The facts of the crime and the response of the University were at issue. EMU claimed that they did not want the perpetrator to flee, so they left the cause of death as “natural” as indicated by the (acting) county medical examiner. Eventually, another enrolled student was charged with the crime and convicted. However, EMU was fined over $800,000 for violation of the Clery Act, which requires the reporting of crimes. The university president, the EMU chief of police, and several others resigned. 

 

Has an interest in policing.

Here and now, my request for an informal meeting with the chair of the UT sociology department was answered by the acting chair because the chair is on sabbatical. Despite Dr. Lin Ken-Hou’s protest that UT is not the place to study white collar crime or misconduct in scientific research, several professors in the department do claim relevant interests. 

 

More to the point, if I had had the opportunity to talk out the options, even if it were true that none of their sociologists is interested in crime, that in itself would have been a good reason for me to do just that and complete some original and significant research for the department. 

Just one option would have been to work with the Institutional Review Board, which audits research and investigates lapses in ethics. 

That is especially relevant because UT is a research university, not a teaching college. Our classes here are taught by graduate assistants (and post-grads). At EMU, the school motto is “Education first.” If your name is in the book, then you are the person standing in front of the class. In my last year there (2010), plans were made to allow graduate students in physics to do some teaching but it was then a notable exception. Like Texas State University here in San Marcos, EMU was the old Normal College, the school where teachers were trained. When EMU sought to ramp up its game by joining a sports conference with more television money, they hired an athletic director at three times the salary of a department chair, $300,000 versus $90,000 per year. Wags with spray paint went around campus: Education first—and 10! 

 

So, it is here at UT. You can find a webpage about our Nobel laureates: https://news.utexas.edu/2019/12/09/longhorn-laureates/ In fact, none of them is here. The last two on campus both died. Steven Weinberg was enticed to retire here. He continued to write essays. John Goodenough taught chemistry at the the UT Cockrell School of Engineering and among his achievements was the invention of the lithium-ion battery. As for the other Nobel laureates, biology professor Hermann J. Muller was forced out for being a communist. (After quick turns in Germany and then the USSR, he returned to the USA. Later, Carl Sagan was one of his students.) UT alumnus John Maxwell Coetzee earned his doctorate here in 1969 and then went to South Africa. He was not allowed to come back because he had published a protest against the war in Viet Nam.

 

Back in 2005, when Weinberg was reputed to be the highest paid professor at $400,000 football coach Mack Brown was paid $2.1 million. Today, coach Steve Sarkisian is paid $10.6 million and quarterback Arch Manning earns $1.6 million from Name Image and Likeness (NIL) under NCAA rules in place since 2021. Weinberg was awarded a $3 million Breakthrough Prize in 2020 just one of several such honors over the years. That being as it is, the fact remains that an undergraduate playing football earns three times more than the best paid professors and eight times more than the average professor’s salary. (See: https://texascollegesalaries.com/institution/17)

 

A card-carrying criminologist will tell you that crime knows no neighborhood. In other words, there are no bad neighborhoods, just different crimes in them. In the suburbs, they don’t beat up strangers, rob the corner liquor stores or snatch purses, they just work at corporations that dump toxins into the aquifer and then they try to delete their emails. That being so, it remains that you don’t find a lot of broken windows and absentee landlords in the suburbs. In poor neighborhoods, the people lack more than anything else social status and social capital. The broken windows theory explains why the sociology department does not welcome outsiders into their academic ghetto. You can argue the cause and effect of broken windows and broken homes but when a culture, a society, is in decline, fixing the windows will not solve the deeper problems.

 

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Westrum’s “Three Cultures” Organizational Typology

Ronald Mark Westrum’s typology of organizations is an investigation of information flow in order to understand how groups thrive, survive, or fail. He finds that generative organizations get the right information to the right people in the right context. Bureaucratic organizations do this when the environment is conducive to stability, but they fail to perform under stressful new challenges. Pathological organizations have no concern for their outcomes and are defined only by how successful their leaders are at hoarding and controlling information for personal gain.

He writes: "I created a typology in 1988 to compare the way that organisations processed information. … The idea was to characterise general ways of coping with information, especially information that suggests anomaly. Failures in information flow figure prominently in many major accidents, but information flow is also a type marker for organisational culture. In some organisations, information flows well, and elicits prompt and appropriate responses. In others it is hoarded for political reasons or it languishes due to bureaucratic barriers. This typology has proven useful in a variety of safety related fields, such as aviation, nuclear power, and, increasingly, medicine. 

"The underlying idea is that leaders, by their preoccupations, shape a unit’s culture. … These preferences then become the preoccupation of the organisation’s workforce, because rewards, punishments, and resources follow the leader’s preferences.

"Generative organisations get the needed information to the right person in the right form and in the right time frame. This behaviour is based on the leader’s emphasis that the most important goal is to accomplish the mission.

"By contrast, pathological circles tend to view information as a personal resource, to be used in political power struggles. It will be withheld, doled out, or used as a weapon to advance particular parties within the organisation. 

"When bureaucratic organisations need to get information to the right recipient, they are likely to use the standard channels or procedures. These standard channels and procedures are often insufficient in a crisis. They failed, for instance, in communications between New York police and fire departments on 11 September 2001. The police knew that the World Trade Center north tower was about to collapse, but failed to communicate this to the firefighters inside the tower, many of whom died. By contrast, in the same circumstances many generative organisations would cross departmental lines or use a back channel to get the information to where it was needed. The Apollo 13 space crisis shows an excellent example of a generative response. By contrast, the fumbling that led to the demise of Columbia space shuttle shows bureaucracy at its worst."

 “A typology of organisational cultures,” BMJ Quality and Safety, 2004;13:ii22-ii27. https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/13/suppl_2/ii22

 Ron Westrum was my professor for five of eight sociology classes at Eastern Michigan University 2005-2010 as I completed a BS in criminology and an MA in social science. Among those courses were Complex Organizations and the Sociology of Technology. He wrote Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development at China Lake (Naval Institute Press, 1999), which was my introduction to the U.S. Naval Institute of which I have been a member since 2015.

Studying information flow in airline cockpits, Westrum applied his reseach to hospital operating rooms. From there, his theories gained even wider acceptance. You can find the full text of the paper in many places online. “A Typology of Organisational Cultures” by R. Westrum. Quality and Safety in Health Care 13 Suppl 2 (suppl_2):ii22-7 January 2005 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/8150380_A_Typology_of_Organisational_Cultures  This work is widely cited. See “DevOps culture: Westrum organizational culture,” at 

https://cloud.google.com/architecture/devops/devops-culture-westrum-organizational-culture He has a stub in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Westrum

 

Dr. Westrum’s typology pinpoints the failure mode for a bureaucracy. However, in our class in complex organizations, we also examined its strengths. Bureaucracy is a pre-requisite to democracy, especially for a complex society. In a functioning bureaucracy, each piece of paper moves from desk to desk on its own merits regardless of the tribe, family, caste, religion, class, race, ethnicity, sex, gender, age, or wealth of its originator. America’s failure to establish democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan is attributable to the lack of functioning indigenous bureaucracies. A functioning bureaucracy does not necessarily bring democracy. We studied the Ottoman empire as a case in point. It is necessary, but not sufficient.

 

Our model for rescuing a bureaucracy was Capt. D. Michael Abrashoff’s It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy (Warner, 2002). Since then, I believe that Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders by Capt. David L. Marquet (Steven R. Covey, 2012) took the lesson even farther. Proof of this is the fact that Marquet’s Santa Fe and its people continued to thrive after he left, whereas the USS Benfold did not continue the journey charted by its captain.

 

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