Hello and welcome. This is the first newsletter of the third Phoenix Convention, otherwise known as P-CON III. The con will be held, as were the previous two, in the Ashling Hotel on Parkgate Street, Dublin 8. However, although the previous two conventions were in September and November, respectively, P-CON is now moving into its permanent home in the spring of the year, and will take place on the weekend of the 11th & 12th of March 2006.
Although there’s almost a year to go to the con, we have been working at it for quite some time now. We launched the new con website in March, and, although there are still a few pieces of it needing to be brought fully up to date, particularly some of the guest biography pages, we are all quite pleased with it so far. The website is available at www.slovobooks.com.
Many thanks to the industrious and charming Ian Sheppard for all his hard work on the site, which gets lovelier with each passing year. Thanks also to Feòrag NicBhrìde for the wonderful Phoenix logo, which she has graciously allowed us to continue to use.
We are extremely delighted to have Susanna Clarke as our Guest of Honour for 2006. Susanna’s first novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, published in October 2004, has already become a publishing sensation, and has been nominated for more or less every literary and genre award going. You can read more about Susanna Clarke on her guest bio page.
As well as our Guest of Honour, we have quite a number of other guests attending the con. Some are at this stage old friends of P-CON, whose return we welcome, and some are coming to the con for the first time. In any case, we are justifiably proud to include in our guest list all these talented people: Danielle Ackley-McPhail, Ariel (editor in chief of The Alien Online), Eugene Byrne, Paul Cornell, Diane Duane, Maggie Furey, George Green, Colin Greenland, Ian McDonald, Juliet E McKenna, Leah Moore, Peter Morwood, John Reppion, M J Simpson, Colin Smythe, Steve Westcott, and the editorial crew of Irish SF magazine Albedo One.
Bios for some of these guests are already on the site, or will be posted there very soon. We have also been in touch with a few other people, so expect to see a few more names on the list before next March. Over the course of the next few newsletters, I’ll try to give some information about some of the guests, but for the moment I’d like to extend congratulations to Ian McDonald for winning the BSFA Best Novel award for River of Gods, which is also nominated for the best novel Hugo Award, as is Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. I’d also like to give a quick mention to Paul Cornell, who has written the Father’s Day episode of Doctor Who, which is to be broadcast on the 14th of May.
To find out more about our guests, follow the links on the right-hand side of the convention site webpages. If there isn’t a bio written for the person you’re looking for, there will be soon, so keep coming back!
Joining P-CON III is remarkably simple: just go to the join-up page and follow the wonderfully simple instructions.
Membership costs for the con are currently standing at Euro 25 for an adult weekend attending membership, or, for those of you in the Sterling zone, STG£18.
The rate will not be changing until the day of the con, when the door price will be Euro 35. The simplest way to join the con is via PayPal through the con site, but you can still join the old-fashioned way, with a printed out membership form and a cheque. You can even, if you’re feeling particularly generous, make a donation to the con via the join-up page…
We seem to have an unerring ability to choose a sporting weekend for P-CON, and this is the case again this time, I’m afraid, with a rugby match on the same weekend as the convention. This meant that the hotel is not in a position to offer us a special rate for con attendees. However, you can find information on the hotel accommodation, as well as nearby alternatives, on the con’s Accommodation page.
The committee for P-CON III consists of Gareth Kavanagh, Siobhan McKenna, Jennifer Power, and myself, Pádraig Ó Méalóid, with final committee positions to be fully nailed down. We have had two escapees since last time, with Deirdre Walsh and Ian Sheppard both stepping down. Yes, I know Ian is still doing the website, he’s just doing it from a non-committee position, is all… Deirdre, in the meantime, finds that her recent marriage to my good self, along with our recently purchased new house, gives her all the excitement she needs, so has left the rest of us to our own devices. They are both, above and beyond everything else, good friends, and I couldn’t have got where I am now without them. Cheers, folks.
Before I finish, I’d like to extend my congratulations to Randall Shepherd, who is the new chairman at Octocon. Octocon takes place once again this year in the Glenroyal Hotel in Maynooth, on the weekend of 15th and 16th October, and we’re hoping to have a fan-table there, so if you’re there, we’ll see you there. You can see the Octocon website at www.octocon.com.
And that’s all for the time being. Much more news about the con in coming newsletters, and I hope to see lots of you in Dublin in March next year!
Best wishes,
Pádraig Ó Méalóid
Chairman
P-CON III