SF NEWS for MAY 2026
From "Across the Fandomension" website
NOTE: I am always looking for corrections, additions and updates; if you spot errors and omissions below, please contact me at [email protected] so that I can update this page. – G.S.
The 2026 Aurora Award Voting Ballot
The Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association (CSFFA) has now finalized the voting ballot for the 2026 Aurora Awards! Voting for the awards will open on June 6th and run until July 18th. The following eligible works published in 2025 are listed below. The ballot is available at https://www.csffa.ca/.
The awards are nominated and voted on by members of CSFFA. Memberships are open to all Canadians and Permanent Residence for a nominal fee of $10 per year. The deadline to purchase a CSFFA membership this year is July 11th.
This year's ballot contains authors and creators from across Canada. The results will be announced during a live streaming ceremony on Sunday, August 9th on YouTube.
For Best Novel
CSFFA Now on Discord
"We're happy to announce that CSFFA is joining the great Discord bandwagon, and has created a community server where fans, readers, creators, and all Canadian SFF enthusiasts can gather online to discuss Canadian speculative fiction and the Aurora Awards. The Discord server is open to the public, and you can join us using this link."
(CSFFA newsletter, March 2, 2026)
Filk Hall of Fame Nominations Go Missing
"FilKONtario, which held its 2026 event this past weekend [April 18-19], maintains the Filk Hall of Fame for notable contributors to the art of filk music. On April 10, it issued a statement about lost nominations:
'If you are not already aware of this situation, some nominations did not reach Dave Hayman, the Filk Hall of Fame administrator, in time to be included in the nomination files sent to the jury. There was a backup that enabled us to recover most of the nominations that were sent in, and we were even able to get most of them added to the files before voting was completed.'
"Anyone is able to submit a nomination for the Filk Hall of Fame (the nominations page even has several examples of what a good nomination should look like), and those nominations are passed along to a jury. Where other awards may have a jury of professionals or fans, the Filk Hall of Fame jury is uniquely structured as a collection of conventions, each selecting one or more representatives to evaluate nominations.
"In addition to the nomination deliveries, FilKONtario also felt it needed to apologize for past communications:
'We are very sorry that some of the messaging and communication around this seemed insensitive. We know that tone can sometimes be lost in text-only communication, especially when emotions are high, and we are truly sorry.'
"The statement also promises an improved process to be unveiled by the end of May. This year's Filk Hall of Fame inductees are Margaret Davis, Tim Griffin, and Amy McNally."
(SMOF News, volume 5, issue 35, April 22, 2026)
On Spec News
On Spec Magazine, which recently ceased publication as a periodical from the Copper Pig Writers Society (in Calgary), will now be an anthology launched by ShadowPaw Press (the press operated by Edward Willett in Saskatchewan). The Kickstarter campaign to support this publication concluded successfully on April 16, 2026.
(Garth Spencer & Mickey Mikkelson, April 2026)
History Repeats Itself
"Barbie Dream Fest, held this past weekend [March 28-29] in Fort Lauderdale, was promoted as a top-tier, interactive experience full of glamour and all things Barbie. Instead, it has become the latest viral failed event, drawing comparisons to Fyre Festival and the Willy Wonka Experience in Glasgow, in mainstream reporting, and to DashCon and other disastercons within fandom.
"Like the other events, Barbie Dream Fest promised great things and badly underperformed in both experiences and attendance. But where Fyre Festival, DashCon, and most of the other famous failures were created by people with little experience with big events, who found they had badly underestimated the time, money, and other resources needed to pull off a successful headline event, Barbie Dream Fest was run by Mischief Management, which has nearly two decades of fan convention-running experience behind it.
"Mischief Management, as many readers will guess from the name, has roots in the Harry Potter community, where it began as an informal organization running a Potter convention called LeakyCon (now a more general fantasy media convention called Enchanti-Con) which dates back to 2009.
"No explanation of what went wrong is forthcoming. Mischief Management has issued a brief statement promising refunds to all attendees. Mattel provided a statement to the BBC saying it had nothing to do with the event beyond licensing its brand.
"CBC News got in touch with another company that had initially been part of the event only to find out that whatever went wrong, had been going wrong for a while: Misfit Toys Communications was involved with the initial announcement of Barbie Dream Fest last July.
"When reached by CBC News, a spokesperson said they terminated their contract with the producer of the event in October, 'due to lack of payment and our concern that the event was not shaping up to be what was originally described.'"
(reprinted from SMOF News, April 1, 2026)
What Vancouver Fans Are Doing
The West Coast Speculative Fiction Association (WCSFA) participates in a number of community and fan-like events around the Lower Mainland, as detailed in the WCSFA newsletter (see "Zines Received").
WCSFA is holding monthly meetups at Browns Social House in New Westminster, on the 4th Saturday of each month starting at 1:00 pm, featuring gaming and socializing.
Fandom Bazaar will be held July 11, 2026 at the Sapperton Community Hall, 318 Keary Street in New Westminster, BC. This will be "a flea market event for the whole family, where you can find new and used treasures, curiosities and crafted goods. Our focus is on items connected to genre fandom, including anime, comics, games, movies, sports, and more!"
(from WCSFA Newsletter, April 2026)
Amazing Stories Best of 2025 Is Now Available
"About time I got around to doing this! My third anthology of stories from the Amazing Stories website is now available! Bright red, with artwork from science fiction's favourite gremlin, Frank Kelly Freas. Now available at Amazon."
(Lloyd Penney, March 11, 2026)
The Future of Con Crud:
SARS-CoV-2 Is Less Deadly But More Summery
"Your Local Epidemiologist, in a retrospective on the six-year anniversary of COVID-19 being declared a pandemic, points up two notable recent developments which may affect congoing decisions, one potentially worldwide and another in the US.
"The first is that COVID-19 infections are now roughly as severe as flu. It is still nothing to trifle with, seeing how flu kills hundreds of thousands of people worldwide every year, but it means that we have passed through the period in which COVID-19 is a truly extraordinary threat.
"Whether this can lead to a shift in mask policies for conventions that still have them will depend on the priorities of the individual conventions. The pandemic period also made many cons more sensitive to the risks run by their disabled members, and some fan communities have become much less dismissive of "con crud" of all sorts.
"The other piece of news is that the pattern of COVID-19 waves in the United States has stabilized for now into one wave in the summer and one in the winter, with the summer wave larger than the winter one. Although we are used to thinking of airborne respiratory diseases as primarily a winter phenomenon, the season of crowding indoors with air conditioning is turning into the bigger thread for COVID. If you’re planning to go to one of the big summer cons in the US, you might want to get your COVID booster in the spring rather than the fall."
(SMOF News, March 25, 2026)
Brisbane in 2028
The Brisbane in 28 WorldCon bidding committee has filed its papers with this year’s WorldCon to officially enter the ballot for the 2028 WorldCon. Here is their latest post: https://www.brisbane28.org/the-brisbane-in-28-worldcon-bid-is-now-official
(The Chatter Box 2, March 2026)
New Biography About CSFFA's 2025 Hall of Fame Inductee Charles R. Saunders
"Charles R. Saunders was the founder of the "sword and soul" literary genre with his Imaro novels, a Halifax journalist, and a Black Canadian literary icon. When he died in obscurity in 2020, journalist Jon Tattrie joined fans worldwide to uncover where he was buried, commemorate his life, and bring him the prominence he deserved.
"For Black History Month, Rachel A. Rosen and David L. Clink of the Wizards & Spaceships podcast were joined by Jon to tell us about Charles’ remarkable career and his new biography, To Leave a Warrior Behind: The Life and Stories of Charles R. Saunders, the Man Who Rewrote Fantasy..."
(CSFFA newsletter, March 2, 2026)
Disability and the Modern Media Convention
"... CBC reporter Amanda Shekarchi ha[d] an article looking at some of the ways disabled fans
experience a typical media convention.
A wheelchair notes a problem that is familiar to many fans of all abilities, and one that isn’t:
Chaz Fisher is a convention volunteer and wheelchair user. He says that navigating Fan Expo Canada, which is held across two buildings and multiple levels at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, is time-consuming and challenging. …
"It’s a pain to get to, even as an able-bodied person, never mind somebody who is navigating a disability," he says. "For me, it is a struggle to get between both buildings because wheelchairs and carpets don’t mix."
Carpets are an unavoidable feature in many venues, but one place they aren’t is in the large event halls of most convention centers, such as the one Fisher is pictured in.
Those halls often have a bare concrete floor, and putting carpet down for the duration of a convention is a choice.
But it’s not just up to the convention. Shekarchi, who is blind, recalls a memorable actor booth: Some people read Braille, and at [Michaela Jill] Murphy’s booth at last year’s Fan Expo Canada in Toronto, she had Braille prints of Toph available. Others benefited from more tactile handheld items. She is currently working on making more tactile merchandise that fans can hold, including knitted turtle ducks — a fictional creature from the Avatar world — or raised prints, using bubble markers to create a tactile autograph.
Fisher also calls for more disabled volunteers:
"If there’s a child who is meeting the [star] of their favourite video game or cartoon, and their parents bring them up and they see somebody with a disability running that line, I think that sets a precedent for them," Fisher says. The advice for any disabled fan who wants to volunteer is the same for any other would-be volunteer: know your limits, and clearly communicate what you can and can’t do."
(from SMOF News, March 11, 2026)
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