Minicon

Minicon

A relatively old (founded 1968) sf convention of the type I think of as "traditional"; Minicon has throughout its life had programming on media SF as well as written SF, but the guests have been from the writing and editing world, plus from the fannish world. Minicon is run by the Minnesota Science Fiction Society, Inc. (known as "Minn-StF" and various other abbreviations; there is officially no preferred abbreviation).

Minicon has been unusual in having a large focus on music, and unusual again in that music not being mostly of the kind found at the time in filk circles. Minicon started having a "musician guest of honor" in 1980, and did so regularly for some time. The music at Minn-StF and Minicon started long before that, though.

Minicon underwent a rather convulsive realignment and set of changes starting in 1997 (and resulting in changes to Minicon starting with Minicon 34 in 1999) with a proposal from a group calling itself the "High Resolution Council" (of which David Dyer-Bennet was a member) which called for some reduction in the size of the convention and a considerable reduction of focus on elements judged "peripheral", which resulted in great social and political upheaval, the founding of at least two new conventions (CONvergence and MarsCon), and the regaining of operational control of Minicon by Minn-StF. Tempers still run high over some issues from this period, and if people want to fight it over again here we should probably split that off into a separate article.