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The Forever War Comes to Escape Velocity – Museum of SF Con 23 March 2017.

The Forever War Comes to Escape Velocity

Washington, DC (March 23, 2017) – The Museum of Science Fiction is proud to announce that Joe Haldeman will be the Literary Guest of Honor for Escape Velocity 2017.Joe Haldeman is best known as the author of The Forever War, which is widely acclaimed as being the greatest military science fiction novel ever written. Joe began his writing career while he was still in the US Army, where he fought in the Central Highlands of Vietnam as a combat engineer. He sold his first story in 1969 and has since written over two dozen novels. Joe has won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards, as well as the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Locus Award, the Rhysling Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. In 2010, Haldeman was honored with the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America for lifetime achievement in the genre.  Haldeman’s latest book, Work Done For Hire is a near-future science fiction story that considers the dangers of living in a surveillance state – it is available at Barnes & Noble and Google Play.

“I am delighted to be on the Escape Velocity program this year,” said Haldeman. “The literary track promises to be evocative and provocative – and make us think about where we, as human beings, may be going. The Forever War shows us what we should avoid.”

“Haldeman was quoted in Motherboard as saying, ‘you might try to eliminate war by eliminating the conditions that cause it, like poverty and racial hatred and religious animosity.’ The time has never been more appropriate for us to examine The Forever War in this context,” said Charles Hildebrandt, production counsel for the Museum of Science Fiction. “The Forever War is more than a harbinger; it represents a multidimensional warning for us to outgrow war and regrettably seems to be in perfect resonance with our current global state of affairs.”

More information about this and other activities are available here: www.museumofsciencefiction.org

About the Museum of Science Fiction
The nonprofit Museum of Science Fiction will be the world’s first comprehensive science fiction museum, covering the history of the genre across the arts and providing a narrative on its relationship to the real world. The Museum will show how science fiction continually inspires individuals, influences cultures, and impacts societies. Also serving as an educational catalyst to expand interest in the science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM) areas, the Museum uses tools such as mobile applications and wifi-enabled display objects to engage and entertain.

About Escape Velocity 2017
The Museum of Science Fiction and NASA are partnering to bring Escape Velocity 2017 to Washington, DC. The event will be like a micro futuristic world’s fair to promote STEAM educational activities within the context of science fiction using the fun of comic cons and fascination of science and engineering festivals. Escape Velocity 2017 seeks to make a measurable positive impact to boost informal learning on the more conceptually challenging academic areas. Escape Velocity’s mission is to re-invigorate the interest of our young people in science, technology, engineering, art, and math by producing and presenting the most compelling, exciting, educational, and entertaining science festival in the United States using science fiction as the primary engine. Escape Velocity will achieve orbit on September 1 – 3, 2017 at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel and Convention Center in Washington, DC.

UncleGeoff

Geoff Willmetts has been editor at SFCrowsnest for some 21 plus years now, showing a versatility and knowledge in not only Science Fiction, but also the sciences and arts, all of which has been displayed here through editorials, reviews, articles and stories. With the latter, he has been running a short story series under the title of ‘Psi-Kicks’ If you want to contribute to SFCrowsnest, read the guidelines and show him what you can do. If it isn’t usable, he spends as much time telling you what the problems is as he would with material he accepts. This is largely how he got called an Uncle, as in Dutch Uncle. He’s not actually Dutch but hails from the west country in the UK.

One thought on “The Forever War Comes to Escape Velocity – Museum of SF Con 23 March 2017.

  • Color me snarky.

    Joe Haldeman is GoH because they’re paying him. Fine by me – take the money, Joe. You deserve it.

    This is the *second* Escape Velocity, which comes as a bit of a surprise. The facilities in which it’s held can accommodate a large number, and EV is trying to position itself as an event along the lines of ComicCon or Dragon Con. But I’d be deeply surprised if their first attempt attracted as much as a thousand attendees when what they’d like is 10,000, and only the presence of corporate sponsors paid the bills.

    Poke around on the site, and you discover a sponsoring organization that doesn’t actually know anything about SF cons, and which rebuffed the offers of help from Baltimore/DC fans who have done things like run Worldcons. (Their legal verbiage about volunteering is unintentionally hilarious.)

    If you want grim amusement, there are three editions of the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction available for download as PDFs. It’s an academic journal, where articles discuss other articles, and it’s not clear anyone writing the papers has *read* the SF literature the Journal is supposedly about. I recall hearing a while back about a woman getting a graduate degree in Science Fiction Studies without ever actually reading SF. What she did read was other academic’s dissertations about it. That’s about how the MOSF Journal of Science Fiction comes across.

    I suppose $DEITY may work a miracle, and the MOSF will acquire a site and create an actual SF Museum, but I’m not holding my breath while I wait.

    At some point, I expect the corporate sponsors to ask themselves what they’re getting from supporting this beyond a tax deduction, but it hasn’t happened yet.

    I don’t know now where I might be September 1-3, 2017, but Event Horizon is unlikely to be the place.

    Reply

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