Back in April of 2011 – my husband Ivan and I decided we wanted to attend our very first Sci Fi convention, so he got to work on creating our costumes for the event. Ivan decided he wanted to make functional Mechanical hands and after studying how the human fingers work and taking a few lessons from a crab leg..he figured it out.

His hand was a hit at NORWESCON and within weeks, the silly little Youtube video he had created to share his awesomeness was getting thousands of views a day.

Little did we know that this would not only lead him to getting numerous orders for pairs of these mechanical hands from fellow goofballs that love to dress up and be a little crazy too, for a director of a play, a plastic version for a team of scientists at UCLA and a major Robotics company…but that one day he would get an email from a man named Rich in South Africa who was curious to see if Ivan could help him find a way to figure out the design he had been working on to restore two of the 4 fingers he had recently lost on his right hand due to a woodworking accident…after looking into a few prosthetics and researching the Xfinger design and being told it would cost him up to $10,000 (US Dollars) per finger…he knew he would never be able to afford this and wanted to design something on his own.

This was no longer a “Silly project” Ivan had been doing for a few extra bucks once in awhile…this now had purpose. It had possibilities. It could…change lives.

You can read more about this incredible project at coming up short handed, and Norwescon is proud to have such dedicated people in our membership. Congratulations and best wishes to Ivan Owen and Richard Van As!

[Katrina] Marier is the editor of Westwind, the magazine of the Northwest Science Fiction Society. Shawn just finished a multiyear stint as chair of the Northwest’s largest science-fiction convention, Norwescon….

Thousands were at the annual Norwescon here in April….

Fandom is very tolerant of differences, she said. At a convention you’ll see someone in a Star Trek uniform walking down the hallway with ladies in ball gowns, going to discuss interstellar travel.

“Some you’ll like and some not. Some you’ll agree with and some not,” she said. “You all can occupy the same space for the course of a weekend. That is very important, and we could use a lot more of that in our national discourse.”

Adventure TV was filming on Saturday at this year’s Norwescon 35, so we can look forward to another feature in the future!

Once I got rolling, I wrote Wetware at white heat. I wrote the bulk of the first draft during a six-week period from February to March of 1986, although the full process took about five months. I made a special effort to give the boppers’ speech the bizarre Beat rhythms of Kerouac’s writing — indeed, I’d sometimes look into his great Visions of Cody for inspiration. Wetware was insane, mind-boggling, and, in my opinion, a cyberpunk masterpiece.

I dedicated it to Philip K. Dick, placing my dedication above a quote from Albert Camus’s essay, The Myth of Sisyphus. The quote: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

A couple of years later, in 1989, Wetware would win me a second Philip K. Dick award.

This award ceremony would be at the smallish NorwesCon SF convention in Tacoma, Washington. It wasn’t like the artists’ loft in New York at all. It was in a windowless hotel ballroom with a dinner of rubber ham and mashed potatoes.

We like to think our food offerings have improved over the years.

When I was growing up in the ’70s in suburban Seattle, I had a secret obsession. I was a science fiction and fantasy nerd. This was waaaay before it was ever halfway cool to be one. This was before “Star Wars,” mind you. Before Comic-Con and “The Dark Knight” and the “Lord of the Rings” movies. These were the dark days of “Logan’s Run” and “Zardoz” and “Silent Running.”

My dad was an aspiring sci-fi author and we used to go every year to NorWesCon, the sci-fi and fantasy convention of Seattle. The most bizarre, mossy, unwashed nerds of the northwest would crawl out of their caves and cabins and caverns and descend upon the Ramada Inn at Sea-Tac airport for a weekend of lectures, book signings and Dungeons & Dragons gaming.