Rounding our our featured guest list is Nat Segaloff, our NESFA Press Guest. Nat will be joining us from February 16-18, 2018 at the Westin Waterfront Hotel. Join us for a terrific convention!

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Nat Segaloff is a writer-producer-journalist who was kidnapped into science fiction by John de Lancie, Leonard Nimoy, and Harlan Ellison (except in Harlan’s case it was speculative fiction). A former film industry journalist who wrote over the years for Boston After Dark, Time Out (New England), Moving Pictures magazine, The Real Paper, The Cambridge Express, The Real Paper, but mostly for The Boston Herald, Nat also appeared on WBZ-TV’s “Evening Magazine” and WSBK-TV’s “Movie Loft & Company” as well as on WEEI-FM, the CBS radio station, and independent broadcaster WITS-AM. Since none of them is around any more (except Nat and the Herald), it’s easy to understand why he fled to California when Boston dried up to make TV documentaries and write books. Among the former are A&E Biography episodes on John Belushi, Stan Lee, Larry King, and Shari Lewis & Lamb Chop; four Rock ‘n’ Roll Moments clip shows; and various other projects including an HBO documentary on the American parole system.

His books include biographies of William Friedkin (Hurricane Billy), Arthur Penn (Arthur Penn: American Director), Stirling Silliphant (The Fingers of God); a journal on the making of the last film that John Huston worked on (Mr. Huston/Mr. North); the best-selling swan song chronicle Final Cuts: The Last Films of 50 Great Directors; and two edgy memoirs, Screen Saver and Screen Saver Too.

It was John de Lancie and Leonard Nimoy who asked Nat to form Alien Voices with them in 1995 after a noteworthy NPR broadcast of Invasion from Mars. Together they produced five audiobooks for Simon & Schuster Audio. Dramatized by Nat and de Lancie and featuring all-Star Trek casts, the titles included The Time Machine, A Journey to the Center of the Earth, The Invisible Man, The Lost World, and The First Men in the Moon (the latter of which was also presented by the Si-Fi Channel (sic) as the first live TV/Internet simulcast.

Nat is the co-author (with NESFA member Daniel M.; Kimmel and Arnie Reisman) of The Waldorf Conference, a comedy-drama about the secret 1947 meeting of studio moguls that began the Hollywood Blacklist. The play had its all-star world premiere at L.A. Theatre Works and was acquired for production by Warner Bros. He produced a subsequent staging (in which Harlan Ellison acted a major role) to benefit the Hollywood ACLU and the Writers Guild Foundation. He was staff producer for The Africa Channel, wrote the stage comedy Closets (mounted by the Cape Ann Shakespeare Troupe at Massachusetts’ Gloucester Stage Company), and is writer for the popular public radio word/game show “Says You!” after having been a frequent guest panelist.

Nat’s appearance at Boskone 55 arises from a five-year project called A Lit Fuse: The Provocative Life of Harlan Ellison. Published by NESFA Press, it’s the first-ever biography of the controversial, prolific writer and the first to include substantial excerpts from his work.

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Harlan Ellison & Nat Segaloff

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Our Hal Clement Science Speaker for Boskone 55 is Catherine Asaro. She will be joining us to talk science and fiction from February 16-18, 2018 at the Westin Waterfront Hotel. Join us for a terrific convention!

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Catherine Asaro is an author of science fiction, fantasy and thrillers, and has written over twenty-five novels, as well as short stories and non-fiction. Her acclaimed Ruby Dynasty series combines adventure, hard science, math, romance and fast-paced action. Among her numerous distinctions, she has won the Nebula® and Analog Reader’s Choice awards. Her most recent books are the anthology she edited, The Nebula Awards Showcase 2013 (Pyr), the novel Carnelians (Baen/ Simon & Schuster), and the anthology of her short fiction titled Aurora in Four Voices (ISFiC Press). All her novels are available in audio form and her most recent eBook releases are the award-winning works, Primary Inversion, “The City of Cries” and “The Spacetime Pool.” Her book Undercity is due out from Baen in 2014.

Catherine earned her doctorate in theoretical chemical physics from Harvard. She has coached numerous math teams, in particular the Howard Area Homeschoolers and Chesapeake ARML program. Her students have won top honors in many competitions, including the USA Mathematical Olympiad and the USA Mathematical Talent Search.

Catherine is a member of SIGMA, a think tank of speculative writers that advises the government on future trends affecting national security. She is also known for her advocacy in bringing girls and women into STEM fields. She has been an invited speaker at various institutions, including the National Academy of Sciences, Harvard, Georgetown, NASA, the New Zealand Context Writer’s program, and the US Naval Academy.

Catherine is also a dancer and musician. Her first CD, Diamond Star (Starflight Music 2009), is the soundtrack for her novel of the same name, cut with the band Point Valid. Her second CD, released with Donald Wolcott, is called Goodbye Note (Starflight Music 2010), and her single “Deep Snows” was released with the Peppercorn Band in 2012. The vide for “Deep Snows” was nominated in the Best R&B video category of the World Independent Music and Film Festival. Catherine appears as a vocalist at cons, clubs, and other venues in the US and abroad, including as the Guest of Honor at the Denmark and New Zealand National Science Fiction Conventions. She performs selections from her work in a multimedia project that mixes literature, dance, and music with Greg Adams as her accompanist and band leader. You can chat with her at www.facebook.com/Catherine.Asaro

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Boskone is honored to announce Craig Miller as our Special Guest. He will be joining us February 16-18, 2018 at the Westin Waterfront Hotel for a terrific convention!

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Craig Miller is a well-known and respected writer/producer with over 300 credits. He has worked in live-action and animation, written scripts, developed series, pitched to studios and networks, produced, cast, approved storyboards, character designs, and animation – the entire gamut of what goes into creating, selling, and producing a TV series.

Miller received degrees in Child Development and Social Psychology before becoming involved with the entertainment industry. For the next several years, he worked as an executive and consultant in publicity, marketing, and licensing for Lucasfilm, Warner Bros., Universal, Disney, Columbia, Henson Associates, and others. His work included the films Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Excalibur, Superman II, Altered States, The Dark Crystal, The Wicker Man, The Muppets Take Manhattan, Splash, My Science Project, Real Genius and many more.

But for most of his career, Miller has been writing, developing, and producing for television, films, and games. His career includes working directly with creative forces of nature such as George Lucas and Jim Henson and on every kind of project from a syndicated magic special to Sesame Street. This has provided him with broad-based experience including industrial films, movie trailers, stage productions, and the areas which have occupied most of his time and efforts: animation that ranges from Curious George and The Smurfs to Beast Wars and The Real Ghostbusters and live-action series such as Showtime’s horror series The Hunger and the science fiction adventure series Resistance.

The majority of Miller’s work has been for the children’s, tween, and teen/young adult market. His 104 episode TV series Pocket Dragon Adventures was a finalist for the Humanitas Prize and was seen seven days a week on the BBC and in over 125 countries around the world. His writing in this arena has run the gamut from action-adventure projects like G.I. Joe and Beast Wars to comedy-adventure series like The Real Ghostbusters to softer shows such as The Smurfs. He spent three years writing the multiple-Emmy-winning Curious George for PBS. For that series, the first several DVD releases are each titled and themed after his episodes and new Curious George books have been written based on his scripts.

Recent work includes developing and writing for: Resistance, a live-action science fiction adventure series; Fortune Teller, a live-action fantasy adventure that’s a mixture of Vampire Diaries and Game of Thrones; Playtime Buddies, an animated pre-school series; Basketeers, an animated sports-themed adventure series; Grandpa’s Robot, a new series for Latin America; Cheddar Man & the Mysteries of Food, an animated educational series developed for a food channel; Wingin’ It, an animated comedy-music series based on a country singer’s children’s book; two series – Majid and Karamella – created and produced for the Middle East, and Pet Parade, a series for the web.

Miller has worked on games as well, including consulting on the story, characters, and gameplay for a game created for the international charity WarChild to use in helping former child soldiers and child refuges traumatized by war in their home-countries acclimate back to a world where people work together and find non-violent solutions. He’s also written comics for DC, Disney, and others, including adapting the manga title Cobra for the US market.

His work is in demand outside the U.S. as well. For CCTV, the official Chinese television network, he co-developed and wrote episodes of the animated series Flute Master (soon to be released on DVD in the US). Flute Master has been a major hit in China, playing to over 265 million viewers. Additionally, he’s worked with production companies and channels in China, Australia, Latin America, Italy, France, Israel, Dubai, and elsewhere around the world, developing and writing both live-action and animated series.

Miller is also a popular speaker on writing and has done so in many different parts of the world. He has been a guest speaker on creating characters, crafting stories, writing dialog, and developing programming for animation and games at such international events as the Annecy Animation Festival in France, Cartoons on the Bay / The International Conference on Television Animation in Italy, and the Interactive Entertainment Festival in Scotland, and Orbit Live in Mumbai, India, as well as for events in the U.S. including NATPE; KidScreen Summit; and the World Animation Summit, as well as Comic Con in San Diego; the World Science Fiction Convention; and many other events.

He’s lectured at UCLA and Columbia College and taught classes for the Art Institute of California and Woodbury University. Comments from his students on anonymous surveys administered by the colleges ranged from the prosaic “He is very experienced and very good at explaining concepts to students” to the extravagant heights of “Craig kicked ass and this class was fucking awesome,” “This was the only class I actually attended every week,” and “Add more weeks to the semester! This class rocks!”

Miller was a consultant to the Washington D.C. Implementation Group on developing the rating system for children’s television in the United States and was the sole scriptwriter invited to take part in a multi-day seminar of academics, researchers, and top network & studio executives gathered to develop guidelines for creating television programming for children. He was also one of the creators and an active participant in the Writers Guild of America’s Literacy Project, putting professional writers into public schools to work with teachers and their classes on a recurring basis, to encourage reading and writing.

Miller is a member of the Writers Guild of America (for which he chairs the Animation Writers Caucus), the Writers Guild of Canada, and the Television Academy (where he has been an Emmy Judge for several years). He also leads Professional Development for the organization Women In Animation and has been a judge for ASIFA’s Annie Awards.

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Boskone’s Official Artist is the very talented Marianne Plumridge who will be joining us in February for our 55th convention! We are planning a fantastic selection of events and another wonderful art show!

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Marianne Plumridge is an Australian-born artist and writer who lives in Rhode Island, USA, with her husband, illustrator Bob Eggleton. They share their home with over 1,000 Godzilla monster toys, and just as many dinosaurs, dragons, and other odd beasties and creature figurines. The rest of the house is occupied by numerous books, paintings, art materials, and CDs. It really is a creative atmosphere, where inspiration is never lost for long.

In the last few years, Marianne has returned to her fine art roots by refining her oil painting techniques. As well as painting natural subjects, Marianne has combined birds and robots into an ongoing series of ‘technology lost in nature’ paintings that include quirky tin toy robot adventures, to great acclaim. Her other ongoing concurrent themes of cosmic whales and pointy rocket-ship paintings still enjoy success and popular favor. The results can be found online at: ‘Daub du Jour.’ Even more recently, Marianne has revived her interest in painting figurative works and portraits. Her experimental, ‘self-testing’ exploration of painting people again continues apace.

In connection with her long held writing ambitions, Marianne writes book reviews and notes on her second Blog, ‘Muse du Jour.’ Finished works of fiction have found their way into magazines and anthologies over the years, as well as articles and essays. Currently, Marianne continues to work on writing the nearly complete text for a book called “Bob Eggleton’s Ice Age America” for Impossible Dreams Press, in collaboration with her husband. It will feature essays and epic artwork and visions of prehistoric peoples, megafauna, and flora…and especially Mammoths and Mastodons. Marianne and Bob’s first collaboration as writer and artist, a children’s picture book called If Dinosaurs Lived in My Town was released in November 2013 from Sky Pony Press. Late this year, one of Marianne’s ‘more than doodle’ rocket paintings will grace the cover of Analog Magazine in the November/December 2017 Issue.

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We are thrilled to announce that Tamora Pierce will be joining us at Boskone this year as our Young Adult Fiction Guest. It should be a wonderful convention and we look forward to seeing you there!

Buy your membership to Boskone today and come meet young adult author Tamora Pierce.

Tamora Pierce is the winner of the 2013 Margaret A. Edwards Award for Lifetime Achievement in Young Adult Literature, the RT Book Reviews Career Achievement Award, and the 2005 Skylark Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for Imaginative Fiction. She is a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of more than 28 fantasy novels for teenagers, and has been Guest of Honor at numerous conventions, including Worldcon 2016.

She has written comic books, radio plays, articles, and short stories, and currently devotes her minimal free time to local feline rescue. Tortall: A Spy’s Guide, a collaborative effort with other experts on her Tortall universe, will be coming out in October of 2017, followed in February of 2018 by the first in a three-book Tortall series, Tempests and Slaughter.

Tammy lives in central New York with her husband Tim Liebe and their uncountable number of cats, two parakeets, and the various freeloading wildlife that reside in their back yard. You may find her at www.tamorapierce.com, on Facebook, and on Twitter.

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Boskone is delighted to announce Mary Robinette Kowal as our Guest of Honor. Mary will be joining us February 16-18, 2018 at the Westin Waterfront Hotel for a terrific convention!

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Hugo-award winning author, Mary Robinette Kowal is a novelist and professional puppeteer. Her debut novel Shades of Milk and Honey (Tor 2010) was nominated for the 2010 Nebula Award for Best Novel. In 2008 she won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, while two of her short fiction works have been nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Short Story: “Evil Robot Monkey” in 2009 and “For Want of a Nail” in 2011, which won the Hugo that year. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, and several Year’s Best anthologies, as well as in her collection Scenting the Dark and Other Stories from Subterranean Press.

Kowal is also an award-winning puppeteer. In high school, she took up puppetry as a hobby, but as Kowal says, she “never thought of it as something you could get paid for.” Instead, she went to East Carolina University to pursue an art degree, minoring in theater and speech. While performing as Audrey II in a performance of Little Shop of Horrors, she learned that a professional puppeteer had come to the show. It was a turning point. Kowal went on to intern at the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, GA. With over twenty years of experience, she has performed for LazyTown (CBS), the Center for Puppetry Arts, Jim Henson Pictures and founded Other Hand Productions. Her designs have garnered two UNIMA-USA Citations of Excellence, the highest award an American puppeteer can achieve.

Her career in puppetry consumed much of Kowal’s creative energy for over ten years. Although she wrote in high school and college, it wasn’t until her brother moved his family to China that she began writing again. Like Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie, she started creating children’s fantasy as a way to stay connected to her young niece and nephew. Reminded of how much she enjoyed writing, she began submitting short stories and made her first sale in 2005, and her first professional sale to Strange Horizons in 2006.

When she isn’t writing or puppeteering, Kowal brings her speech and theater background to her work as a voice actor. She is a member of SAG/AFTRA. As the voice behind several audio books and short stories, she has recorded fiction for authors such as Kage Baker, Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi. She likes to describe voice acting as “puppetry, without the pain.”

Mary lives in Chicago with her husband Rob and over a dozen manual typewriters. Sometimes she even writes on them. Visit www.maryrobinettekowal.com.

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It’s the middle of summer, which can only mean Boskone 55 is coming in fewer then 6 months and our team is kicking into high gear as we plan for next year’s convention. We will have a few new announcements coming soon, which should be a lot of fun!

In the meantime, to help us in the early stages of planning, we have set up two forms: one to help gather ideas for Boskone and one to enable potential program participants to request a survey. If you’d like to share your thoughts with us, this is the best way to let us know what you are thinking.

Here are the links to the Boskone 55 planning forms:

• Program Participants:  If you would like to be considered as a potential Program Participant, please send us your contact information via this form.
• Program Ideas: If you have a program idea that you’d like to share with us, please visit our Program Idea Form.

Register for Boskone — Weekend Rates are Now Available:

Save save some time and buy your membership today for Boskone 55. Plus, buying your membership early is a great way to let us know you are coming. We look forward to seeing you there!

• Adult Full Convention: $55
• College Student Full Convention: $35 (school ID required)
• K-6 Full Convention: $25 (school ID may be required)
• 7-12 Full Convention: $25 (school ID may be required)
• Kids-in-Tow: $0 (children ages 7–12 who stay with their parents)

Boskone 55
February 16-18, 2018

Visit the Boskone website for more information.

The Boskone Flash Fiction Slam returned for its fourth year with nine writers stepping up to the challenge of writing and reading a short story in under three-minutes. A panel of esteemed judges offered critique for each author. Each story was rated on a scale of 1-5 with scores tallied to determined the winners.

This year’s winner is M.Adrian Sellers with second place to George Galuschak and third place to Mihku Paul. Two years ago, M. Adrian Sellers placed third in the Boskone 52 Flash Fiction Slam. Since Boskone Flash Fiction Slam is a regional qualifier to the New Hampshire Writers’ Project annual Three Minute Fiction Slam, Mark is invited to participate in the finals held NH Institute of Art on March 9, 2017.

Thanks to judges James Patrick Kelly, Dana Cameron, Bruce Coville, Leigh Perry, to moderator Rob Greene and to all nine writers who participated: Bob Kuhn, M. Adrian Sellers, Robin Orm Hansen, Mihku Paul, Jason Febery, Christopher Cornell, George Galuschak, Chia Evans and Mike Ciaraldi.

On Saturday, February 18, 2017, the New England Science Fiction Association (NESFA) held its awards ceremony and announced the winners of the 2016 Skylark Award andthe Gaughan Award. Congratulations to our winners!

2017 Skylark Award

The Edward E. Smith Memorial Award for Imaginative Fiction (the Skylark) is presented annually by NESFA to some person, who, in the opinion of the membership, has contributed significantly to science fiction, both through work in the field and by exemplifying the personal qualities which made the late “Doc” Smith well-loved by those who knew him.

2017 Skylark Award Winner:
Jo Walton

Jo Walton has published thirteen novels, three poetry collections and an essay collection. She won the John W. Campbell Award in 2002, the World Fantasy Award for Tooth and Claw in 2004, the Hugo and Nebula awards for Among Others in 2012, the Tiptree Award for My Real Children and the Locus Non Fiction award for What Makes This Book So Great in 2014. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal. She reads a lot, enjoys travel, talking about books, and eating great food. She plans to live to be ninety-nine and write a book every year. Her most recent novel is Necessity.

2017 Gaughan Award

The Gaughan Award honors the memory of Jack Gaughan, a long-time friend of fandom and one of the finest SF artists of the 20th century. Because Jack felt it was important to encourage and recognize new blood in the field, The New England Science Fiction Association, Inc., presents the Gaughan Award annually to an emerging artist (an artist who has become a professional within the past five years) chosen by a panel of judges.

2017 Gaughan Award Winner: Kirbi Fagan

Kirbi Fagan is an award-winning Metro Detroit based illustrator who specializes in creating art for young readers. Her illustrations are known for their magical themes, nostalgic mood, bright colors, and powerful characters. Kirbi’s work has been acknowledged by organizations such as Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles and New York, ImagineFX, Art Order and the International Writers & Illustrators of the Future. Recent clients include, Marvel, Capstone Publishing, Stone Arch Books and Dark Horse Comics. Kirbi lives by two words… “spread joy.”

Not everyone can brave the cold New England winter to make it to Boskone. If you’re using social media, like Twitter or Instagram, considering tagging your posts with #boskone to share your experiences and photos.