Shelly Bond’s editing career includes a 22-year run at DC Comics’ Vertigo line and the creation of Black Crown, IDW’s ‘indie record label’ imprint that merged music and comics. As well as her work on Sandman, Lucifer, Clean Room, Fables and Kid Lobotomy, she’s also known for the Hey, Amateur and Insider Art anthologies, and…
Category: Guests of Honour
Judges: The Genesis of the World of Judge Dredd
In a time of widespread poverty, inequality and political unrest, protests and violence meet the first Judges as they hit the street to enforce the Law. The cure, it’s clear, is far worse than the disease. The ‘Judges’ novellas allow for an unprecedented opportunity to delve into the history of this future fictional police state.…
Dare to Speak Their Name: Including the Queer in Worldbuilding
This panel from Octocon 2020 is brought to you in honour of International Transgender Day of Visibility 2022. To find out more about it, visit our 2021 charity: BeLonG To Youth Services is the national organisation supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI+) young people in Ireland. Panel Description Speculative fiction can give us…
Michael Carroll – Guest of Honour
Irish writer Michael Carroll has written many, many books and comics, including the award-winning New Heroes series of Young Adult superhero novels and the #1 Amazon best-selling cult graphic novel Judge Dredd: Every Empire Falls. He currently writes Judge Dredd, Proteus Vex, Mayflies and Dreadnoughts for 2000AD and Judge Dredd Megazine. Other works include Jennifer…
Helen Ryder – Fan Guest of Honour
In her own words…. As a child I was an avid reader, and the first SF books that I recall reading included the ‘Kemlo’ books in the school library, and Star Surgeon by Alan E. Nourse. Then a school friend introduced me to Asimov as an author and I was lost. When I was 18…
Philippa Ryder – Fan Guest of Honour
In her own words…. I first became involved in fandom when, sick in bed with a cold, my mother bought me The Early Asimov vol. 1. Asimov quickly became a hero of mine, and I loved the snippets of life in New York in the 1930s and 40s he told of, talking of Worldcons, fanzines…
4th Wave Feminism in Science Fiction and Fantasy
No one is just one thing, and intersectionality teaches us that the overlapping pressures from society affect us all in different ways. Fourth wave feminism seeks to address these pressures on women without excluding other aspects of identity. The demand for more diverse creators and content, and the centering of women and minorities as superheroes,…