<plokta.con>

Note: this page refers to the first <plokta.con> in 2000. The pages for the current convention are here.

After several years of nagging by friends and enemies, the Plokta cabal has finally decided it's time to run another convention. <plokta.con> will be a small, friendly SF convention, and will held over the Spring Bank Holiday 2000. Many of you will already know us. The cabal hive mind comprises six grown-ups (Steven Cain, Steve Davies, Giulia de Cesare, Sue Mason, Alison Scott and Mike Scott), one rampaging toddler (Marianne Cain) and one foul-tempered black cat (George). And rather a lot of computers. We collectively formed the committee for the 1991 filk con and the 1995 Eastercon, and have individually run many other cons. We have published 16 issues of our fanzine, Plokta, and edited a wide variety of official and unofficial con newsletters. We have also had several excellent holidays together, and eaten any number of hot dinners.

A key element of <plokta.con> will be our small but perfectly formed programme, which will feature our Guest of Honour, Ken MacLeod. Ken's novels -- The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal, The Cassini Division, and The Sky Road -- blend cutting-edge SF with the detailed political visions of post-capitalist societies. All in all, we reckon he's one of the UK's hottest SF writers at the moment, and we're delighted that he's agreed to be our guest.

The cabal particularly enjoy small cons, and <plokta.con> is unlikely to have more than 150 members. Here is the current membership list.

Also, we don't believe in reinventing the wheel, so we're picking aspects of recent UK cons that we've really enjoyed. Like Seccon, we will have a single stream programme, with both SF and fannish items and lengthy gaps suitable for the partaking of large meals. But we also want to capture some of the light-hearted feeling that was such a success at Year of the Wombat, though preferably without the pump-action water pistols. And we want the con to have the sort of fannish ambience of the Miscons -- not to mention the real ale. We thought the fanzine room at Attitude was splendid, and we hope to have a repro room available for you to produce one-shots during the convention. The plan is that the superfluous technology in this room will spend at least part of the convention hooked up to the Internet, and we've got the Plokta resident mad scientist, Dr Plokta, working on setting up the vat of hecto jelly as a network printer. We would also like there to be a small dealers' room.

The convention will be held in the Holiday Inn in Leicester. Rooms are £27.50 per person for a double or twin room and £37.50 for a single, including VAT and full English breakfast. The hotel is very near to the town centre, and Leicester itself is only a little over an hour from London by train.

Membership is £20. Please send cheques (made payable to Plokta) to <plokta.con>,3 York St, Altrincham, Cheshire, WA15 9QH