Another successful convention weekend has gone by, and Norwescon 37 is done! Many thanks to all of you who attended, to the many volunteers who showed up to help out, to our concom staff who devote so much of their year to putting all of this together, to the many panelists, artists, vendors, and clubs who participated, and of course, to our excellent Guests of Honor!

We’ll be keeping an eye on social media and the rest of the web for your Norwescon 37 posts, pictures, and memories. We’ll get our official photos processed and posted as soon as we can, but with literally thousands of shots taken by seven official photographers over the course of the weekend, we have a lot of work to do to get them all sorted, processed, and ready to post, so we do ask for your patience. In the meantime, if you’d like to share your photos with your fellow fen, we’d love to see you add them to the Norwescon 37 group on Flickr!

But now that we’ve wrapped up 37, what about 38? If you haven’t heard already via social media or the official announcement at our Masquerade halftime, we have big, big news for next year!

Norwescon 38 will be held April 2–5, 2015; our theme is Distant Horizons, Epic Adventures. We will once again be at the Doubletree by Hilton Seattle Airport, and we expect to have room reservation information posted soon.

To introduce the guests of honor we have confirmed so far, here’s Norwescon 37’s Programming Director and Guest of Honor Selection Committee Chair, Loree Parker:

As Director of Programming, I have the distinct privilege of chairing the Guest of Honor Selection Committee. Along with the convention chair, vice chair, and the two elected members of the committee, it is our job to assemble our dream lineups for the next convention – and next year’s selection of guests is truly amazing.

Another of my duties on the committee is to come up with the theme for the next convention. In some years, the theme informs the guests we invite, and in other years the guests we select give us the idea for the theme. This year is definitely the latter.

The theme for Norwescon 38 will be Distant Horizons, Epic Adventures.

Our Science Guest of Honor works with space telescopes and knows a thing or two about Distant Horizons. She is Deputy Project Scientist for the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer. At JPL she is the Principal Investigator for the NEOWISE project to study minor planets, and the proposed Near Earth Object Camera space telescope mission. She has appeared several times on the History Channel series The Universe, as well as the documentary featurette “Stellar Cartography: On Earth” included with the Star Trek Generations home video. I am honored to announce that the Norwescon 38 Science Guest of Honor will be Dr. Amy Mainzer.

Our Artist Guests of Honor practically define Adventure. Working nearly exclusively in fantasy, their hyper-representational paintings cover dozens of book covers in the genre. Their awards include the British Fantasy Award and the Chesley award, and have multiple Hugo nominations to boot. Avid fitness and weightlifting enthusiasts, they each have played the role as model for the works of art they produce. I am thrilled to announce that the Norwescon 38 Artist Guests of Honor will be Boris Vallejo and Julie Bell.

Our Author Guest of Honor takes Epic Adventures to new heights. But I can’t take credit for inviting him, I’m afraid — all accolades for that go to my predecessor SunnyJim. It’s taken awhile to get him here, because he is very, very busy. How busy? When we asked him in 2012 if he could join us, his reply was “Not next year, or the year after. How’s 2015?” The Executive Team enthusiastically agreed he was worth waiting for. A novelist, short story author, and anthology editor, he is well known in the realms of fantasy, horror, science fiction, and television. His writing career began by writing and selling monster stories to other children in the neighborhood, dramatic readings included. He moved on to writing letters to comics editors, and the first of his many writing awards was for a prose superhero story. He organized the first Hugo Losers’ Party at the 34th Worldcon, served as regional director and vice president of SFWA, left the world of novel writing for a while to become a book editor, and then made the move to Hollywood.

Thanks to SeattleGeekly for creating this!

In the 90s, he returned to writing novels, beginning a fantasy novel inspired by the Wars of the Roses and Ivanhoe. This blossomed into an epic fantasy series, the fifth volume of which won the Locus Poll Award for Best Fantasy Novel. In 2011 the series made the jump to television, winning numerous Emmy and Hugo awards, among so many others. The fourth season is airing now on HBO, and if you haven’t seen last week’s episode, you are in for a treat. I am absolutely gobsmacked to announce that Winter Is Coming, because the Norwescon 38 Author Guest of Honor will be none other than Mr. George R.R. Martin.

Pre-registration for Norwescon 38 is now open! (Pre-registration closed on March 28, 2015.) A full four-day membership is $65; this rate will increase later this year, so pre-register today for the best deal! We’ll be rolling our website over to Norwescon 38 information in a few weeks (our webmonkeys need some downtime to sleep and recharge their banana supply after this weekend), so keep an eye on this website and our Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ social media accounts for further announcements about Norwescon 38 over the coming year!